LB 875 
.D66 

190S" New York State Education Department 
1909 

Copy 1 



ADDRESSES AND PAPERS 



BY 



ANDREW S. DRAPER, LL.B., LL.D. 
Commissioner of Education 



I908-I9O9 



ALBANY, N. Y. 

p4061n.D8.3soo (r-iSgo) 



STATE OF NEW YORK 

Regents of the University 

With years when terms expire 

1913 Wi-iiTELAW Rbid M.A. LL.D. D.-C.L. Chancellor New York 

1 9 17 St Clair McKelway M. A. LL.D. Vice Chancellor Brooklyn 

1919 Daniel Beach Ph.D. LL.D. - Watkins 

1914 Pliny T. Sexton LL.B. LL.D. ------ Palmyra 

1912 T. Guilford Smith M.A. C.E. LL.D. - - - Buffalo 

1918 William Nottingham M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. - - Syracuse 

1910 Charles A. Gardiner Ph.D. L.H.D. LL.D, D.C.L. New York 

1915 Albert Vander Veer M.D. M.A. Ph.D. LL.D. Albany 

1911 Edward Lauterbach M.A. LL.D. ----- New York 

1920 Eugene A. Philbin LL.B. _ LL.D. - - - - - New York- 

19 16 LuciAN L. Shedden LL.B. LL.D. ----- Plattsburg. 

1921 Francis M. Carpenter - Mount Kisco 

Commissioner of Education 

Andrew S. Draper LL.B. LL.D. 

Assistant Cornmissioners 

Augustus S. Downing M.A. Pd.D. LL.D. First Assistant ^ 
Y^K:^vi'KoiAAv.^^.K.Vh..Y>. Second Assistant 
Thomas E. Finegan M.A. Third Assistant 

Director of State Library 

James L V/yer, Jr, M.L.S. 

Director of Science and State Museum 

John M. Clarke Ph.D. LL.D. 

Chiefs of Divisions 

Administration, Harlan H. Horner B. A. 

Attendance, James D. Sullivan . 

Educational Extension, William R. Eastman M.A. M.L.S. 

Exarninations, Charles F. Wheelock B.S. LL.D. 

Inspections, Frank H. Wood M.A. 

Law, Frank B. Gilbert B. A. 

School Libraries, Charles E. Fitch L.H.D. 

Statistics. Hiram C. Case 

Trades Schools, Arthur D. Dean B.S. 

Visual Instruction, DeLancey M. Ellis 



New York State Education Department 



ADDRESSES AND PAPERS 



BY 



ANDREW S. DRAPER, LL.B., LL.D. 
Commissioner of Education 



I908-I9O9 



ALBANY, N. Y. 



L^ 



87 SI 

1 J) (0(P^ r. 



CONTENTS 

. PAGE. 

The Rational Limits of Academic Freedom 3 

Desirable Uniformity and Diversity in American Education 21 

From Manual Training to Technical and Trades Schools 44 

The Democratic Advance in American Universities 54 

The Adaptation of the Schools to Industry and Efficiency 71 

The School Needs of a City 88 

Suggestions to the Staff of the Education Department 103 

Agriculture and its Educational Needs no 

Conserving Childhood 140 

Lincoln 

1 Introduction to the Lincoln Centenary brochure 156 

2 What Makes Lincoln Great ? 158 

3 The Moral Advances in Lincoln's Political Career 169 



O.OF 

1UN S2 







THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 

ADDRESS DELIVERED ON THE OCCASION OF THE SIXTY-SIXTH CON- 
VOCATION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, HELD IN THE LEON 
MANDEL ASSEMBLY HALL, CHICAGO, ILL., MARCH 17, 1908 

I have had the feehng that I was coming to the home of an old 
acquaintance. For ten years we were neighbors. In ways we knew 
not, we spurred each other to make them good, fat years in the 
history of university upbuilding in Illinois. When I was being 
urged to accept the presidency of the University of Illinois, and a 
few hours before the formal election, and in dread of what might be 
the possibilities of the event, I came to this university and met Presi- 
dent Harper for the first time. If he had spoken in Hebrew and 
undertaken to examine me in Old Testament criticism, it would 
hardly have conflicted with what I knew of him, or with my very 
imperfect understanding of a modern university president. But he 
spoke in very kindly English, and you may be assured that he was 
not so unmindful of his diplomacy as to fail to urge me to come to 
Illinois. Neither presidents nor universities were disposed to flatter 
each other when events followed pleasantries and when the contacts 
were mainly upon surging fields of students in noisy contests, but the 
respect which I always had for his learning and his genius was 
in time enriched by the largeness of his heart and the obligations 
which were imposed by the tender of his friendship. And even 
then. Dean Judson was wont to say that state universities had the 
right to be ; and perhaps he did more than any other to teach us 
all that the way to get rich in education is by giving, and that the 
sound prosperity of one institution of higher learning helps rather 
than harms another. So, as I come into the University of Chicago 
for a brief hour once again, there would be something unnatural, 
if not untrue, if I did not pay my respects to the memory 
of its first great president, and express my satisfaction that this 
university, so young and yet so great, maintains the pace and keeps 
the faith under a second president whose qualities and experience 
make him a leader of no ordinary worth to American education. 

And I would not have the students of this university infer that 
my associations have been exclusively with the presidents. Many 
times I have been in the crowd which has felt the impact of your 

[3] 



4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMLNT 

stern and unpitying hand, and I have given my weak but willing 
support to the crowd which has often flagellated you. Mr George 
William Curtis once remarked to me that before he had the grippe 
he had nothing but contempt for it, but when he got out of it 
he had nothing but respect for it. The grip of the University 
of Chicago bears no comparison with the kind of grippe to which 
Mr Curtis referred, for no one can remember the time when there 
was nothing but contempt for it; but I suspect that we shall all 
agree that neither of these neighboring universities has ever felt 
the loosening of the other's grip in sport without a noticeable 
enlargement of respect for the strength and the skill which were 
behind it. 

The candidates for degrees today may be comforted with the 
assurance that in their triumphant university hour they are not to 
be oppressed with admonition and preachment. I come to you with 
a little of the feeling of Dr Henry Van Dyke, who once said 
something to the effect that he stopped preaching to a great New 
York city church and went down to Princeton to teach the boys, 
because he felt the irony of exhortation or argument with veteran 
parishioners who had been many times saved or were apparently 
past all hope. Your new found veteran standing shall exempt you. 
Your degrees will evidence your secular salvation, and even though 
you were limping spiritually, as I do not suppose you are, benevo- 
lent words would seem commonplace today. 

The theme of the hour shall be academic freedom and the limits 
of conduct which will let the truth thrive. The literature of the 
subject is prolific but there is no clamor in the forum just now. 
There has been no recent crucifixion without cause. There is no 
one in the stocks. There is no impending trial. There is no omi- 
noi^s raven on a bust of the goddess of wisdom above the chamber 
door. Freedom may be discussed with freedom. An academic 
question may be treated in an academic way. 

v;^;: . : j THc Evolution of our Higher Education 

The development of college and university teaching in America 
m?ikes a surprising and fascinating story. Looking for the mere 
statistics of it, we find none of much service to us before 1870, 
when the reports of the Bureau of Education begin to be available. 
Even in 1870 the classification was much less rigid than it has 
sineef become. In that year there were 369 institutions, with 3201 
tmoheis' 'and 54,500 students. In 1906 — rigidly excluding all 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 5 

schools of actual secondary grade, all preparatory departments, 
and all professional schools not associated with a university, but 
including the advanced technical schools — there were 508 institu- 
tions, 21,849 teachers, and 135,834 students. In 1880 the income 
of the colleges and universities was $2,225,915; in 1890 it was 
$10,801,918; in 1900 it was $26,550,967; and in 1906, 5i>42,537,979. 
In 1880 the value of buildings and grounds was $48,427,875 ; in 
1890 it was $80,654,520; in 1900 it was $154,203,031 ; and in 1906 
it was $247,610,356. 

It is not necessary to remind a university which has been a most 
conspicuous leader in this great advance, how little even these 
figures really express. To gather and expend thl? money honestly 
and beneficiently has been a task of no ordinary difficulty, but to 
develop such a great throng of uniformly satisfactory college and 
university teachers in this brief time, we may admit between our- 
selves, has been practically impossible. ; i.jilT 

In this single human generation all of the essential factors of a 
unique system of university education have developtd in America. If 
it is not better than any other, it is better for us than any other. It is 
within bounds to say that there is no longer need of forcing students 
into the foreign life which President Harper used to lament, in 
order to give them as scholarly instruction as is provided anywhere 
in the world. 

We will not deny that, upon the whole, that system is different 
from every other. In this generation the sciences as well as the 
classics compelled recognition and forced their methods upon all 
the rest. They created colleges of their own. The applications of 
scientific study to the constructive and manufacturing industries 
came and made other colleges of their own. The higher education 
of women, upon an entire equality with men, and the carrying of 
liberal learning into numberless phases of the natural activities of 
women, made the men move around, and forced so much moving 
that some of the wise men of the East, with the best intentions and 
the utmost effort, have not yet been able to become quite reconciled 
to it. The imperative needs of the professions, and of a continually 
increasing number of professions, have taken up large tracts of 
university territory because they could not be met outside of the 
university enclosure. To make it possible, a great and universal 
system of middle schools, peculiar to the country, had to be estab- 
lished to connect the universities and the elementary schools ; and 
such a system has been so highly developed that it is doing more 



6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

thau the colleges did before 1870. Then the free right to get what 
one wants without submitting to so much that he does not want, 
and the liberalized methods of investigation and instruction, added 
overwhelming and often unmanageable features to the unfolding 
character of American universities. The obvious educational advan- 
tage to each college or school of association with other colleges and 
schools, and manifest economy, educational and pecuniary, grouped 
them about the same campus, while it added to the intricacies of life 
and the difficulties of administration. In a word, the offering of all 
there is in learning to all who want it and will fit themselves to 
come and take it, and the application of the higher learning to 
every human activity, has become the self -assumed and the meas- 
urably accomplished task of American universities. 

Democracy and Unique University Features 

This would not have been attempted, and it could not have been 
realized, but for the political philosophy of the country. But the 
political thinking which inspired the undertaking would never have 
accomplished it without putting into it two great factors which are 
essentially unknown to the universities of other lands. One is the 
board of trustees composed of educational laymen, chosen for their 
character, their benevolence, and their experience in managing 
affairs ; and the other is the payment of teachers without reference, 
or often in inverse proportion, to the number of students whom 
they instruct. 

Not many universities in other countries owe their being to private 
benefactions, or to the efiforts of a representative democracy to 
work out its theories and prove its worth through education; and 
not many of them are sustained by means and influences which are 
most concerned that every son and daughter of the people shall 
have their utmost chance. The universities of other nations are 
expressive of the national intelligence and progress, of the national 
experiences and needs, and of the national attitudes and power. 
Beyond their revenues from fees they are but meagerly supported 
by government funds. Their internal organization and administra- 
tion rest, with the educational faculty or the leaders of it; and 
within the ordinary activities of accepted procedure they are unham- 
pered. They undertake less than we do and perhaps accomplish some 
things that they undertake more exactly than we do. The means 
of expansion are seldom within themselves, however, and the exter- 
nal powers which limit their possibilities are themselves limited by 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 7 

social, religious, political, and pecuniary conditions which those 
powers could hardly change if they would, and probably would not 
change if they could. 

No one can fail to note that regularly recurring salary warrants 
and the absence of a system which automatically rids an institution 
of teachers who do not teach what is wanted, or in the way wanted, 
have a very decisive bearing upon the freedom and the expansion 
of universities. But the direct bearing of the board of trustees 
upon the life and growth of a university, while no less potential, is 
not quite so obvious. 

An English or German university professor has only amazement 
at the presence of a lay court of last resort in the government of 
an American university. He holds it to be a limitation upon 
university freedom and a desecration of very holy ground. On the 
contrary, it brings into the affairs of a university a factor which 
makes for freedom and particularly for growth. Standing for 
donors in time past and in time to come, no matter whether the 
donors be individuals or a state, the trustees come into sympathy 
with the teaching, and add the factor which gives the institution 
very complete independence. It completes the essential elements of 
self-expansion. Ordinarily composed of men or women of represent- 
ative character, the board of trustees regulates the business affairs 
of the institution and holds the confidence of the public concerning 
its needs. They are themselves sorely perplexed about its instruc- 
tional and research work, but after their freshman year they realize 
that they have limitations of their own, and then matters run 
smoothly enough. The constant presence in university councils of 
representatives of the external world, to which the institution must 
look for support of every kind, and of which it must be a part if 
it is to give back an acceptable intellectual service, doubtless goes 
further than anything else to explain the wholly unparalleled 
advance of the higher learning, in the last generation, in this 
country. 

Freedom of American Universities 
However the matter analyzes, and whatever the explanation, 
these American universities are the finest illustrations of human 
power and human reason and human freedom, working together 
for beneficent ends, that the minds and hearts of men and women 
have brought about. They pursue their great courses, controlled 
by both centripetal and centrifugal forces, as freely as a planet 



8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

revolves about its sun. They exemplify free government in its most 
refined form because a university will be free anywhere, and here a 
university is in the midst of the freest government in the world. 
They stimulate every human interest and respond to every rational 
demand. Their very existence is wrapped up in their freedom. 
They attract munificent gifts of money and affection because they 
are free to administer them for the enlargement of human efficiency 
and good will. But their power is in their freedom to resist as 
well as in their freedom to do. Their moral forces are energized 
and their spiritual aims quickened because they are free enough to 
resist mere ecclesiasticism. They enrich the rich through intel- 
lectual association with the poor, and the poor through the same 
association with the rich. In their affairs men and women find the 
places to which they are entitled, and are thrust out of the places 
which they lack the moral and intellectual right to hold. The 
semester examinations are no more inexorable than is the sentiment 
of the campus. Always surrounded by politics in a state of erup- 
tion, they easily defy political intrusion and are expected to refuse 
to promote any political end. Giving instruction in every study, 
they try out educational values through processes which are unre- 
lenting and by standards which will not give way. They make their 
own organization, they administer their own estate, they hold the 
right of initiative as to every undertaking, they may refuse as well 
as accept, and they have within themselves the men and the women, 
the powers and tiie means, of steadily enlarging their reach and 
of continually enriching their lives and their work. In sane and 
unselfish hands, guided by scholarship and by moral sense, they 
grow large because they accord with the prevailing opinions of 
the Republic, and their very enlargement, as well as their learning, 
makes for the freedom of the truth. 

Basis of Academic Freedom 

Fortunately something happens now and then to remind us that 
these universities are very human institutions. They are in the 
world ; the people who are making them great are not yet ripened 
for translation. Their officers and teachers have been gathered 
quickly, and opportunity acquired suddenly is often misused. In 
his inexperience and enthusiasm, particularly in his unfamiliarity 
with the thinking and the pace of the Mississippi valley, a young 
professor from New York might forget that the intellectual capital 
of the ages may exceed the brief output of a New York, a German, 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 9 

or an English sdiool. And ambition, vaulting ambition, may impel 
a mere human to overlook the need of time, labor, and the forget- 
fulness of self by which academic preference may be secured, or 
held when conferred. 

Academic freedom rests upon the same principles as political 
freedom ; but it rests upon other principles also. Formal law is an 
insufficient basis for academic freedom. Mere inclination can not 
prevail in a university so much as it may outside of it. The asso- 
ciations of the academic body are freer than those in the civic 
state. The propriety and the possibility of that depend upon a 
clearer understanding of freedom and a surer capacity for it. It 
rests not upon legal obligation so much as upon generosity; not so 
much upon possibility and opportunity as upon the subordination 
of self to the atmosphere of the place and the common good. 

Academic freedom is not for the teacher so much as for the 
truth. Scientific truth goes further than civic truth. It is dis- 
tinctly higher than social truth. The Puritan doctrine, that he who 
hears untruth or partial truth and fails to rebuke it participates in 
it, has never prevailed and ought not to prevail in the civic state 
or in social life. All of the truth about the mere incidents of life, 
happily, does not at all times have to be spoken. Untruth about 
mere matters of opinion does not always have to be corrected. But 
the main function of academic freedom is the unlocking of scien- 
tific truth. There can be no academic freedom which is opposed to 
it. Scientific truth invites and stands the last analysis. There can 
be no compromise about it. Scholarship covets an opposition which 
reveals misapprehension or gives added significance and strength to 
the truth. The acceptance of alleged truth without evidence is bad 
enough in a university, but not quite so bad as the self-interest and 
conceit which necessarily protect it in the name of academic free- 
dom. Academic freedom which is self-seeking more than truth- 
seeking is mere license and can not live in the academic atmosphere. 
Happily, it is governed by the higher law. It is an attribute of 
normal lives. One who can not safely exercise it may not have it; 
and from one who can exercise it safely it may not be withheld. It 
goes with one who can appreciate not only his obligations to a 
human institution — to its donors, its officers, its teachers, its stu- 
dents, and its graduates — but also the responsibilities of that in- 
stitution to the constituency it is bound to serve, and to the world 
it is bound to enlighten and make better ; and it departs from one 
who is so academically abnormal as really to put his mere liberty 



10 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

of personal movement above the institution which gives him his 
opportunity, and above the truth which he assumes to think he is 
endeavoring to set free. 

Universities Must Discriminate 

Universities are very great, and very complex, and very human 
organizations. They have to care for property, they have to handle 
much money, and they are obliged to account in very worldly 
fashion for what they do. They must break out new roads, and 
they must equip themselves with a great array of educational imple- 
ments ; they must lay hold of rational educational theories, and they 
must have a superior knowledge of educational values. That has 
to be done through experts and teachers, for whom they have to 
assume responsibility. 

The freedom and the accountability have to balance each other, 
or there can be no harmony and efficiency ; and without these there 
can be no internal enthusiasm and no external confidence and 
growth. It all depends upon a true educational spirit which enriches 
itself by giving, and upon a balanced organization which assumes 
responsibility without limiting educational opportunity. 

Our great American universities, above any others in the world, 
are forced to the necessity of discrimination. Their very lives 
depend upon it, and their peril is in the lack of men who can dis- 
criminate with justice and confidence, and who will not be turned 
from doing it by fallacious theories about freedom. Not only 
because of their youth, and their rapid growth, and the fixed com- 
pensations, and the permanent tenures of their teachers, but because 
of the universal ambitions and the intellectual traits of the country, 
they are at all times encompassed with difficult and serious ques- 
tions; and they can not hope to meet the expectations and gather 
the confidence of the country, unless individuality is made to 
respect organization, while organization is moved by the academic 
spirit and responds to educational opportunity. 

There are some spiritual educationists who seem to think that 
Garfield was assuming to describe a university when he said that 
a log with Mark Hopkins on one end and a student on the other 
would make one. He was doing nothing of the kind. His fine 
imagination was paying a fine compliment to his fine old college 
president. If there is one in a university who permits such an 
ideal to beat against the imperative factors of organization, it would 
be well for himself and the rest of the world if he would go out 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM II 

and find a log, impress a student into his experiment, pass his hat 
for sustenance, and work his ideal out to a conclusion. 

If there are minor disadvantages, they have to go with the 
superior advantages of organization. The mighty results of 
cooperative life and effort far outweigh any sweets which the 
recluse may gather by himself. The intellectual and the moral, the 
civic and the legal advances have come through yielding the mere 
independence of self to the advantage of Hving together. 

Make no mistake. The trend of the world is not in the wrong 
direction. Individualism, the opportunity of selfishness to have its 
own sweet way, will have to reckon with organization inside, as 
outside, of universities. Organization protects against want and 
associates thinking with fact, energizes intellectual productivity, 
and gives scholarship its real opportunity. The laws of society and 
of organization will have to prevail. The organization, as well as 
the individual, has rights, and a university invades no sound prin- 
ciple when it maps out its own course, builds its own character, 
gets the best it can in scholarship and in teaching, loses no just 
opportunity to reinforce its strength, holds the good of all above 
the interest of one, insists upon good citizenship in the democracy 
of learning, and gives the world the benefit of it. 

Process of Elimination 

Now let us come nearer to the concrete. By a process of elim- 
ination let us see how little will remain about which academic free- 
dom need be apprehensive. 

Self-seeking must go out at once. Maneuvering for promotion 
or for pay, combining to control policies, and agitation to limit the 
freedom of any other officer or teacher in the institution, must lay 
no claim to academic freedom. A little of this is exceedingly re- 
pugnant to academic truth. If one will resort to it he must abide 
the result without any thought of making a respectable martyr of 
himself. 

The choice of studies in a university is not wholly free. Certain 
studies are required to be taken before others may be. What shall 
be required is often a matter of opinion and it may be a means 
of abuse. It might happen that the weaker a teacher is the more 
preference he must have in the requirements. There are tariffs in 
university schedules as well as schedules in commercial tariffs. The 
arranging of schedules for favor or for monopoly is no more within 
academic policy than within the political policy of the country. If 



12 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

one will indulge in it he must take his academic life in his hand 
and abide the issue. 

Sensationalism has no rights of any kind in a university. Yet 
we must have learned that it is not to be kept out by the saying. 
Novelty of theme or of statement, suited to newspaper exploitation 
and to personal notoriety, are as repugnant to the traditions, the 
philosophic basis, the moral sense, and the freedom of a university, 
as illiteracy is a menace to government in a democratic state, or as 
greed is repugnant to fellowship in a philanthropic guild. One 
may not be allowed to propagate his vagaries upon the time and in 
the name of a university that would like to be thought prudent and 
rational. If one wants to be a professor of myths and ghosts, he 
ought to go out in the woods and sit on a log and pursue his 
inquiries on his own time and in the most appropriate place. Every- 
thing which lacks complete intellectual sanity and sincerity is not 
only without the bounds of the academic privilege, but is a menace 
to academic freedom. 

It has occurred in academic experience that one has had credit 
for the work which another has done, or has transferred the respon- 
sibility for his own shortcomings. This may happen without 
wrongful intent, through subtle reasoning or lack of reason upon 
a subject about which one's mind is exclusive and intense. It is 
surely outlawed in a university, and it must be settled by the ordi- 
nary processes and standards of intellectual integrity. 

Again, the mind of the scholar is jealous of the prerogative to 
do things agreeable to others, and utterly opposed to doing things 
which are against the interests of other people. Yet in academic 
upbuilding the bitter must go with the sweet, and responsibility 
must be associated with opportunity. When Seth Low was presi- 
dent of Columbia he said that the function of a college president 
was both to give and receive pain. Perhaps so, but that is no 
reason why he must monopolize the double function, or why his 
opportunities to give and receive pleasure shall not be as open as 
they may be through the ready recognition of his functions in 
college administration. 

The processes of learning must operate freely, but they can not 
extend to every field of inquiry in one institution. There is no 
academic right to force an institution into undertakings it can not 
afford, or to extend processes once started to lengths which are 
extravagant in time and money, and unpromising in result. And 
th^re is no actual hardship about it, because experience shows that 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 1 3 

the man and the institution who gratify inchnations without refer- 
ence to the material cost, are less productive in new scientific truth 
than those who are compelled to square their work with the usual 
limitations upon human conduct. 

There is less difficulty about all this in the field of the physical 
sciences than in that of the mental sciences. A university which 
would call back an investigator who is anywhere in the region of a 
grain of new truth in nature would cease to be a university, and the 
moment it was done the doors of every true university in the world 
would swing wide open to him. But when we come to the philoso- 
phical sciences, to matters of opinion, we will have to say that while 
the right of individual theory and expression is free, the right of 
place, and of association, and of time, and of opportunity, is not 
without its very decisive limitations. 

There is scarcely an institution of higher learning in this coun- 
try in which the Christian religion is not a matter of both philosophy 
and feeling. It is expressed in the life and functions of the 
institutions. Would the denunciation of Christianity and the propa- 
gation of some other religion be within the academic privilege 
in an institution founded upon, and nurtured by, Christianity? 
There are differing philosophical attitudes and different under- 
standings of history, concerning Christianity. Would an interpre- 
tation of history and a theory of religion consonant with 
Protestantism, be within the academic privilege at the Roman 
Catholic University at Washington, and would such interpretation 
and such theory be without that privilege at Yale? ,,, , ., ; < 

All of our higher institutions are chartered by, and many. of 
them are supported by, a democratic state. Would the contention 
that democracy is a vicious system, or that all government is an 
improper constraint upon the governed, be within the rights of 
free teaching in one of these institutions? May theory pull down 
the roof that shelters it? May a mere doctrinaire overturn the 
fundamental political philosophy which has been worked out in 
this country by hard thinking, by consecration, and by blood ? 

Even Germany does not allow that, and it well may be doubted 
whether the United States ever will go, or ought to go, as far as 
Germany does in regard to what teachers teach ^ and what stu- 
dents do in the name of " scholarship," without reference to the 
balanced character and moral fiber which we hold to be vital to its 
genuineness and its worth. 

There is little difficulty about what shall be taught in the schools, 



14 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

or the freedom with which it shall be taught, until we come to 
topics which, for the time being, are subjects of party warfare. 
And there is no ground for difficulty about those if teachers 
observe the reasonable proprieties of the teacher's office. That office 
is not that of the advocate; it is not that of the agitator; it is not 
that of the executor ; it is not that of the legislator. It certainly is 
not that of the dictator. It is that of the judge. Its function is 
to ascertain and enlarge and expound the truth. It must do that 
judicially. It may be well to observe that there is no other judicial 
power in the organization of a university than what inheres in the 
essential attributes of its officers and teachers. The university has 
the powers of determination, and expression, and propagation, and 
expansion, wholly within itself. Beyond all other human institu- 
tions the American university is without limitations. There is no 
court to say that any educational policy of the corporation is in con- 
flict with the constitution, and therefore void and of no effect. And 
we are easily able to " construe " all formal words that relate to 
education in ways which easily paralyze the profane minds which 
are not acclimated to the atmosphere of the universities. 

Upon what may be called " live questions " we are dependent 
upon the judicial sense, the good breeding, the common sense, the 
sense of the proprieties, and the sense of humor, of the teacher. 
Happily, he fails us in only one case in a thousand. In the excep- 
tional instance the sense of others comes to his rescue. There is no 
limitation whatever upon the sincere effort of such a one to ascer- 
tain the truth or to express his conclusions as to what is the truth. 
The intelligence of the country would sharply resent any inter- 
ference with such effort or such expression within the well under- 
stood conventionalities of the professorial office. 

But as there are conventionalities which one must observe in order 
to be a judge, so there are those which one must observe in order 
to be a teacher, certainly in order to be a university professor. For 
common example, a professor of economics may believe in inter- 
national commercial freedom of trade. It is a mere matter of opin- 
ion. He has the clear right to express his opinions, but surely he 
has no right to enforce them upon students without telling them 
of the objections and the arguments upon the other side. Indeed, 
an intellectually honest man in such a situation will be specially 
careful to elucidate all the contentions of those who believe in pro- 
tection, because he does not agree with them. I can have no valid 
objection to a professor being a free trader. I can not object to 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM 15 

his telling students the reasons why. But I have abundant reason 
for objecting to his hiding from students the arguments which 
support the policy of protection, and to his enforcing his partizan 
view upon mere youth with the ponderous solemnity and entire 
certainty of a military execution. 

Again, there are limitations upon the time and place for the 
proper exercise of the professorial, as of the judicial, office. These 
limitations aid rather than destroy the mental balance. One who 
would appear upon the hustings and say, " I am a judge. I have 
been elected. I have taken the office. I know the law, and the 
right of this matter is thus and so," would divest himself of all 
right to respect, and his office of all right to prerogative and power. 
He must sit upon the bench; he must have jurisdiction; he must 
have an issue properly joined; he must give the parties in interest 
their day in court; he must hear the contending views patiently; 
he must determine only what he has the right to decide, and he 
must do that without bias, with deliberation, and with dignity, if he 
expects to give potency and effect to his judicial office. The pro- 
fessor, no less than the judge, is in quest of the right and of the 
truth. To have result, or to have weight, his quest must be within 
the domain of his professorship, must be pursued with an open 
mind, and must be conducted with a scrupulous regard for the 
amenities of his office. Standing for his science and for the truth, 
and for the university which gives him his right and his oppor- 
tunity, he may reasonably be expected to refrain from conduct 
which, in the judgment of responsible authority, is not compatible 
with either. 

But suppose he is unable to see that it is not the freedom of 
teaching, but only the misconception of the teacher, which is in- 
volved. If he is worthy of a university, the matter will correct 
itself in time, and more than the requisite time is always allowed; 
if unworthy, he will assert misuse, and have things said, and invoke 
sympathy, and perhaps enjoy " martyrdom." He will have the news- 
papers and educational journals largely to himself. The presidents 
and trustees of colleges and universities will doubtless have enough 
to answer for, but there is reason to believe that it will be well 
atoned for by the truths they might have told but considerately 
kept to themselves. But shall there be no determination? There 
are those who say, " Let it all go : it is the price we must pay for 
academic freedom." The price may be wholly unnecessary or far 
too high. May one promulgate as truth mere opinions which are 



l6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

not sustained by the body of his colleagues in his branch of study? 
May he proclaim to the public as discovered truth that which is still 
hidden? May he propagate partizan views and possible untruth in 
his classroom indefinitely and without hindrance? May he employ 
sensational methods to attract attention? May he assume to speak 
authoritatively upon subjects foreign to his own? May he bring 
ridicule upon his university by going to the world upon propositions 
about which he has had no expenience ? May he outrage the rights 
and reasonable expectations of students, and subject donors and 
trustees and colleagues and alumni to humiliation? May he do all 
this and more, and there be no proper remedy? The sense of the 
world, even of the academic world, will not assent to it. If honest, 
give him time, and consideration, and perhaps opportunity for a 
" call " to some other place. There will be some solution. If his 
intellectual integrity limps, give him the admonition of the saints 
and the prayers of the congregation. Paul adjured the 
Thessalonians that they should " study to be quiet," and to such a 
professor a sermon on that text might well be preached. If nothing 
else avails, submit the matter to the sound discretion of the board of 
trustees, and pray that they will not allow fear or favor to interrupt 
the high purposes which a discriminating Providence had in view 
when it disposed that they should be trustees. 

University Forces in Equilibrium 

Our democracy is developing a unique system of education in 
America. It is bringing out a type of university peculiar to the 
country. There can be no university without scientific teaching. 
There can be no great university without teaching that is scholarly, 
free, and aggressive. But there will never be a university strongly 
sustained in this country in which balanced sense does not combat 
unscientific teaching. 

And we may safely go further and say that an American univer- 
sity must be the home of other things than mere scientific research. 
It will not be projected in a groove ; it will not be based upon a 
single idea ; it will not consent to serve a single interest. An Ameri- 
can university will have to give free play to the political philosophy 
of the nation. It will have to stand for character as well as scholar- 
ship. It will have to be the conscience as well as the brains of its 
constituent factors. Opposing points of view are vital to the 
unlocking of the zvhoie truth, and opposing intellectual forces will 
have to enter into the training in moral sense and manliness and 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM I7 

womanliness, which the Republic claims for her college youth. There 
is more danger to the future of some American universities through 
the fettering of administrative, than of academic, freedom. And 
there will never be a representative American university, with virile 
and growing power in it, where the forces which are essential to 
self -expansion and to its representative character are not all present, 
are not held in common respect, and do not balance one another in 
rational equilibrium. 

Those forces are the public, the donors, the trustees, the presi- 
dent, the teachers, the students, and the alumni. Each is to have 
its independence. Each is to be aggressive. None is to trench 
upon the independence of any other. Each is to regard the funda- 
mental principles and the imperative limitations of cooperative and 
organized effectiveness. There is no cause for conflict which is not 
alien to a university and which in an institution worthy of the 
name will not in due time and by natural processes be pushed into 
its subordinate and impotent place, or forced out of the fellowship. 
In a university, as nowhere else, selfishness defeats its own ends. 
Generosity and truth fit together, and where they join forces learn- 
ing will be uplifted, and multitudes of men and women will gather 
about its home. 

The freedom of American sentiment, the history and traditions, 
the temperament and ambitions, the moral fiber and sense of humor, 
the indifference to hurts and confidence in the future, the feeling 
of common proprietorship and the exactions of common sense, are 
all mighty forces in the evolution of a university which can endure 
in the United States. 

President Hyde, of Bowdoin, in one of the best magazine articles 
to be found in the literature of this subject, sounds one note that 
seems to me discordant. Speaking of the donor, he says, " He may 
give or he may not give. After he has given he has no rights." I 
can hardly think that he meant to say that a man with millions, 
which he can never use except by giving, is quite as free not to 
give as he is to give ; and I hesitate not a moment in saying that 
after one has given, his rights to the reafization of his expectations 
are as fixed as law and as sacred as honor can make them. Doubt- 
less the intent was to say that we may accept or we may not accept. 
A university will not accept an absurd bequest, and it is powerless 
to accept an unconscionable one. But obviously the best practical 
realization of a donor's thought is vital in a country where univer- 



l8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

sities have grown out of beneficence in a way and in a measure 
wholly new to educational history in the world. 

All interested in a university are the moral custodians of the 
trust, but the trustees are also the legal custodians of it. We have 
already noted the peculiar advantage which a university derives 
from having all the factors of government and of expansion 
within itself. We have so complete and independent an entity that 
we seldom think of the limitations which must necessarily follow 
exclusive external control by parliament or minister. The Ameri- 
can university board of trustees is itself at all times under the spell 
of the university. It is an influence so elevating and enlightening 
that it beautifully balances that commercial sense and worldly 
sagacity which are the first requisites of the office of trustee. But 
it ought never to be forgotten that the opportunity of the true 
teacher and the health of the institution depend upon the freedom 
of the trustee from bias, from maudlin sympathy, from fear, and 
from selfishness, quite as much as upon any other freedom which is 
bound to find its home in a university. 

The presidency, like the trusteeship, has developed in, and is 
peculiar to, the American universities. It is the essential executive 
office, the logical product of the necessities of such an organization. 
The president does not legislate and he does not appoint or pro- 
mote teachers. But he holds the educational initiative. All ex- 
perience shows that it can not be reposed in a board. It is incon- 
sistent with the legislative function. If he holds it safely, if his 
outlook is clear, and his sense just, and his purposes will not be 
turned aside, and if he is sustained, the university waxes strong 
and great. If not, his administration fails. He must be a great 
leader in education, and he must hold many interests in equipoise. 
He can not lead and he can not bind many interests together in an 
effective whole unless justice and patience and steadiness and firm- 
ness abide with him and he keeps his administrative freedom under 
his own hat. And fortunate is an institution which has found 
the man who can do that ; and more fortunate still is the university 
which has come to see that the freedom of all will be enlarged by 
making it easy, rather than hard, for him to lead when he has 
proved that with reasonable support he is able to lead. 

The teacher who seeks and uplifts the truth will have in this 
country a measure of freedom larger than that of any other coun- 
try, to the accomplishment of his end. If he can not do it in one 
place, there will be plenty of other places where he may. If one 



THE RATIONAL LIMITS OF ACADEMIC FREEDOM I9 

man opposes him, there will be plenty more to give him a helping- 
hand. The measure of his support will be in very close proportion 
to the sincerity of his purpose and the intellectual sanity and in- 
tegrity of his effort. But I accept no theory concerning the rela- 
tions, no rule concerning the treatment, of a teacher, which does 
not make him a well rounded, independent, manly, attractive 
character, who asks no special privilege and avoids no ordinary 
obligation. 

The just freedom of the student is as sacred as that of any 
one else in the university. Like all others he is responsible to law 
and order. If he violates the penal code he should suffer its pen- 
alties. If he dishonors the institution, he should be excluded from 
it. The modern enlargement of his freedom has made him a better, 
a stronger, and a juicier character than he used to be. In his 
quest for learning he is just as free as the teacher. The freedom 
of the student is often the main assurance of the virility of the 
teaching. He must know that somewhere in the institution there 
is a court of last resort that will give him justice, no matter who 
is involved. 

And any course which would repress the free word of the alumni 
in the affairs of a university would certainly be a fatuous one. Of 
course, they may not have thrown off their student feelings or de- 
parted altogether from the student point of view, but their word 
may be no worse on that account ; and whether it is or not, the heart 
beats of the great organization will quicken a little when it is 
spoken. 

If the guardianship of law, through the protection of powers and 
the enforcement of limitations, by the judiciary, is the greatest 
contribution of America to the science of politics, as Secretary Root 
has said ; then the guardianship of truth in every branch of human 
study, through the amplitude of powers, the balance of forces, 
the freedom of procedure, and the limitations upon mere hu- 
man inclinations in American universities, may yet prove to be 
the greatest gift which America will make to world education. 

There are no limitations upon learning in the United States. 
Ecclesiasticism, monarchism, militarism, officialism, or tyranny of 
any other kind, will never be allowed to get in the way of edu- 
cation in this country. Every grade of school will be open to 
every moral, intellectual, and industrial interest of every man 
and woman in the land. But there will never cease to be limitations 



20 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

upon men and women who are promoting learning. Limitations 
are what earnest men need and what great men impose upon them- 
selves. University courtesy may be a hindrance to the truth and a 
curse to teaching. When academic freedom is permitted to further 
the merely human inclinations, it is more than likely to thwart the 
interests of learning. The truth will have to be unlocked and trans- 
mitted through diligence, and patience, and self-abnegation, and 
love of men, and love of the truth, and the compensation for the 
service will have to be in the gold coin of heaven. 



DESIRABLE UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERI- 
CAN EDUCATION 

ADDRESS BEFORE THE DEPARTMENT OF SUPERINTENDENCE OF THE 
NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, WASHINGTON, D. C, FEBRUARY 
26, 1908 

I can scarcely begin without mention of the fact that my entrance 
into the affairs of the National Education Association was twenty 
years ago, in this month, in this department, and in this city. It 
was the beginning of personal, professional, and official relations 
which have been a constant satisfaction to me. I had the temerity 
to present a paper on determining the qualifications of teachers. 
It took ground for state regulation, for the subordination of local 
methods to a state system which would at least protect every dis- 
trict against the relatives, and dependents, and supporters, and 
adherents, of school officials, unless they could pass examinations 
and teach; but it stood for the freedom of all who could stand 
up among men and women and exercise freedom without harm. 
If any one should recall that it was a bit crude, he will at least do 
me the favor of remembering that the speaker was then very young. 
Crude or not, it started an intellectual and pedagogical ruction in 
the department. But what provided the basis for a very earnest 
discussion then, is everywhere accepted now, unless it be in isolated 
sections which I lack the hardihood or the courage to mention. 

The next year at Nashville I became president of the department. 
The record sets forth that sixteen votes were thrown for me, that 
fourteen went for Mr Moffett of Alabama, that there were eight 
scattering, and that an open resolution, without a ballot, was re- 
quired to effectuate my election. Mr Moffett was considerate 
enough to join in the conclusion very heartily, and I held the office. 
The next year, with a much larger attendance, I was continued 
with every expression of unanimity, and the New York and Phila- 
delphia meetings of the department are among the grateful memo- 
ries of my association with the doings of the schools. I should 
therefore be false to much that I cherish, and descend to the depths 
of ingratitude, if I were not to respond heartily to your invitation 
to present this address. 

[21] 



22 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Growing Uniformity 

In the last twenty years the growth o£ uniformity in the plans 
and policies of the schools has been marked. We all know the 
reasons. In part they are internal and in part external. We are 
good travelers and great readers. We are all moved by the same 
ambitions. We would have as efficient and progressive schools as 
any people have. We are moved by the very uniform, and cer- 
tainly the almost universal, advances in the thinking and the doing of 
the country. We have gained in bigness and in weight, and the 
inertia which oppressed us before there was a great ball to roll 
has given place to the new difficulty of safely applying the tre- 
mendous energy of a mighty ball in motion. Rejecting the attitude 
of a wise old man apprehensive about something new, and without 
pessimism, of which I have not a grain, I am going to query to- 
night whether our information is not more general than our dis- 
crimination in its applications, whether the diversity in our situa- 
tions ought not to play a freer part in the determination of our 
policies, and even whether we ought not to be upon our guard 
against a uniformity of educational organization which may either 
overreach or fall short of the educational need of imperative situa- 
tions. And, notwithstanding the difficulty of the task, I am going 
to try to reason out and lay down some propositions upon which 
we may stand concerning desirable uniformity in the logic, and 
diversity in the instrumentalities, of American education. 

Illustrations in Uniformity 

A dozen years ago the president of the University of Illinois 
had some small part in securing the appropriations for a fine new 
library building, and then indulged in some pardonable reflections 
about where it should stand. It was his first experience in the 
matter of placing buildings in Illinois. He reasoned that it might 
well be placed so that it would " quarter " a little upon the course 
of the sun, so that the rather plain stack rooms in the rear might 
be as unobtrusive as possible, and so that the front, when taken in 
connection with other buildings, mig'ht present a sort of crescent 
to the main entrances to the grounds and add a little oneness and 
warmth of feeling to what the architects call " the ensemble." He 
figured it out, had the plat staked out on the exact ground where 
all this might be accomplished, and made it all very graphic by 
causing ropes to be strung around the stakes, so that none could 
lose the effect. He procured the governor to come and look, and 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 23 

the great head of the state said it was " good." He led the board 
of trustees to the scene and exploited to them the sentimental 
magnificence of the prospect. He could not fail to observe that 
they appeared to have some latent doubts about the matter, but 
he noted with satisfaction equal to his appreciation of their good- 
ness, that their skepticism was suppressed by their consideration 
for himself. Returning to the council chamber, they too, in formal 
resolution, pronounced it all " good." Then, at high noon of the 
next day, there was an alumni feast which was attended by revelry 
and mirth and much freedom of talk. In the midst of the hilarity 
one unsubmissive unregenerate got up and said only this and 
nothing more: " Before the trustees break ground for that library 
building, it is to be hoped that they will have sense enough to pull 
it around square with the world " ; and the uproarious acclaim 
which he evoked drove the information into the soul of the president 
that his ambitions and ideals about landscape gardening and archi- 
tectural effect were being quickly prepared for a peace offering 
to the Illinois reverence for the cardinal points of the Illinois com- 
pass. His later information was correct. The ceremony was 
marked by a sympathy for the sacrifice, but by entire firmness and 
determination ; and that building stands upon an exact east and 
west line with its beautiful face squarely turned toward the mathe- 
matical but evasive great north pole, with what seems to me a 
serious and worried look because the curvature of the earth de- 
feats its eternal effort. 

Yet it was well. It is seldom that anything in which we are 
interested is as important as it seems to us at the time. It was 
better that the building should conform to common and harmless 
thought, than that it should for all time be obliged to encounter 
the universal standards of its owners about the fitness of things. 

There are some things that are not likely to be changed. The 
highways of New England will always follow the streams, seek 
the easy grades, wind about the mountains, and be grateful for 
the woods, no matter how long, or how crooked, or how heavy, the 
road may be. The highways of the prairies will always be as 
straight as an arrow, exactly a mile apart, both north and south 
and east and west, and they will never get in conflict with mag- 
netism nor with mathematics. But in each case they advance on 
lines of least resistance, and adjust the advantages of the situation 
to the uses of the people. There are usages or whims, as well as 
mountains and streams, which can not be changed. In the ceme- 



24 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

teries about my New York home the graves are laid with reference 
to the size of the lot, and the trees that are upon it, and the number 
who are to occupy it, and without much thought of where the sun 
rises ; but about my Illinois home the dead are laid on east and west 
lines, with the head to the west, so that when the trump of the 
archangel shall sound the sleeper shall sit up and look to the east, 
lose no time in the bewilderment of turning around, and suffer 
no prejudice in the preferences of the Eternal Kingdom. It is 
better to conform to it than to be distressed by futile attempts to 
reform it. Preaching is a good thing, but much of it is wasted 
because irrational, unspiritual, or aimed at the unchangeable. Uni- 
formity is often a good thing, but it will find its match in the 
Yankee notions of Connecticut. Multiformity is often a good thing, 
but diversified agriculture will not stir enthusiasm among the wheat 
growers of Minnesota and the Eastern Dakotas, nor among the 
corn growers of Illinois and Iowa, nor among the cotton growers 
of Georgia and Alabama. 

Ignorance is unpardonable. Information comes easily. But what 
is well depends upon conditions. Reason must deal with facts. 
Policies must adapt themselves to situations. No matter how in- 
formed one may be about a movement which lias somewhere been 
successful, no matter how contagious is his enthusiasm ; no matter 
hov/ good the motive ; it is all wasted if the thing can not go where 
it is to be tried, or if it must cost in one way or another more than 
it can come to. If time is of no value, if energy is not occupied, 
if novices or geniuses are only wandering in intellectual forests 
and wondering about game, there is no harm : there may be possible 
good. But seasoned and intensive lives can not wait upon mere 
possibilities; certainly not upon those that are too remote. Even 
discovery and invention have come from lives that were balanced 
and intense, that evolved theories that are rational, and that fol- 
lowed probabilities that were at least within the realm of realization. 
And no matter how much we owe to research, to discovery, or to 
invention, the world's work has been borne and the world's advance 
has been made by men and women who are able to see zvhaf may 
be done, and who have the force and the discrimination which can 
do it. 

No Obstacles to Education 

Education comes pretty near being the American universal pas- 
sion. All the people believe in it. If that is not literally true it 
is so near it that no one can disbelieve in it without ostracism. If 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 25 

one is indifferent to it, it is because he is a mental toper or an 
intellectual degenerate. All the people believe in all the people 
having all they will take of it. If there is one who does not it 
is because he is un-American, out of sympathy with the fundamental 
philosophy of the nation. All the people believe in all kinds of 
education for all the people. That belief stirs some trouble of its 
own. Some do not stop to think whether or not the kind of educa- 
tion will go in a particular place, whether or not it will profit a 
particular people, whether or not it will make misfits, whether or 
not it may break the intellectual and industrial equilibrium of the 
country, and therefore impair the individual happiness and the 
moral and economic strength of the nation. 

Now do not infer too quickly that the speaker may be lost in some 
sort of a wilderness; may have become blinded to the lights of a 
lifetime by some stupefying and profane influences. Every boy and 
girl, every man and woman, in America, is to have the utmost of 
educational opportunity that the country, having regard to the 
national unity and the rights of all, can provide. Every one is to 
be helped to the attainment of any distinct purpose which he may 
acquire. Every one is to be given aid in forming his purposes, and 
cheer on the road to their realization. We are in no danger of ever 
thinking that lowly birth may be an obstacle to intellectual great- 
ness. We shall be nearer right in thinking that high birth is a 
greater obstacle. We shall never think that one kind of training 
is good for one class, and that the people in another class are not 
to be allowed to partake of it; or that there is another kind of 
education which is suited to one class, and that none in another 
class can ever want anything to do with it. The suggestion is so 
repugnant to the thinking of the country that it merits neither 
refutation nor consideration. The democracy, the very atmosphere, 
of America, dissolves social sets, redistributes professional and 
business inheritances, and intermingles the wealthier and the work- 
ing classes, very quickly. The son of poor parents has about as 
good a chance as any other boy to be the rich man of tomorrow; 
the child of the wage-earner has as much prospect of intellectual 
conspicuity or commanding influence in the next generation as the 
child of the president of a university, or the president of the nation. 
Indeed, we carry our philosophy to such an extreme that it often 
puts an undue handicap upon the child of momentary prosperity. 
Fortunes in lands and securities, and in mental acquisition and in 
political preferment as well, are not much transmitted, or they are 



26 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

SO much divided in the transmission, or so dissipated by the in- 
heritors, that they count but httle. The exceptional legatee has 
burdens and troubles of his own. 

Not much but work counts. It may be by the hand, it may be 
mental, it may be moral. It counts most if it embraces all. It 
must be adapted to qualities and environment. It must reckon with 
conditions and possibilities. It must be incessant, sustained, dis- 
ciplined, progressive. The worker must regard other workers; 
the work must articulate with other work. There must be ideals, 
but they must be rational. It matters little what the work is, if it 
is of a kind that the world wants done, and if the one who under- 
takes it really does it. It matters much if it is of no account, or if 
the one who undertakes it has no habit of taking care, no interest 
in the process, no pride in the finished product. If it is well done, 
no matter what it is, the world will appreciate the work and regard 
the man who does it. And more than by inheritance, more than by 
situation, more than by favor or by chance, the qualities and the 
worth of the man are determined by the measure and the fineness 
of his work. 

The efficiency of the worker, the fineness of the work, the con- 
sequent worth of the work to the country, and the reflex influence 
of the work upon the worker, turn very largely upon the free and 
natural, rather than upon the constrained, selection of work by the 
worker. To assure the results which are desirable he must choose 
for himself. Of course he must have incentives and inspirations; 
of course he must have lights and opportunities; but he must be 
left to his internal inclinations, tastes, and gifts, as well as to his 
external inspirations and opportunities, to choose the work which 
he wants to do, if there is to be much promise that he will do it 
well enough to be happy in the doing of it, and thus make it of 
some account to other people and therefore of more account to 
himself. 

I make bold to raise the query whether the educational system of 
America has not had an overwhelming trend which has taken away 
much of the freedom of choice and naturalness of selection which 
are necessary to the best individual and public results from the 
adaptation of people to work. I suggest a question as to whether 
we do not have an abnormal, indeed an alarming, number of misfits 
between workers and work. It might not be amiss to go even 
further and raise a question as to whether there is not something 
in the common thought and common ambitions of the country. 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 2/ 

and, as a consequence, something in the prevalent theories and 
plans of the schools, which actually leaves us with great quantities 
of work to do which goes undone, and also with great numbers 
of men and women who are not doing what they might do, and not 
doing much of anything anyway, when the very unfolding of their 
humanity depends upon the number of those who do tiring and 
productive work. 

Perhaps the difficulty, if there is a difficulty, may be expressed 
more clearly, and possibly a remedy may be signified in this way : 
There are great, powerful, and productive nations where the over- 
whelming and successful policy is to keep the masses down. The 
laws are so made, the professions so guarded, the expression of 
political opinion so obstructed, the political assemblies so unrepre- 
sentative, and the social classes so incrusted and segregated, that 
the door of opportunity is practically or completely closed to a 
child of the people. The thing is definitely fixed and steadfastly 
maintained in a way which will enable the few, and their children 
for indefinite generations, to enjoy privileges that they never 
earned, through the political subordination and the physical labor of 
the multitude. In this country we hold all that in abhorrence. Our 
political fathers, no matter where our natural parents lived, deter- 
mined that any law or usage which efifected or continued that policy 
must go down, wherever the flag of the Union should signify the 
thought of the nation. We have not departed from the attitude 
of our fathers. We have worked out their philosophy in a large- 
ness of fact and through a wilderness of difficulties of which they 
never had the slightest expectation or conception. We are now 
committed to that philosophy, not only because it was the philoso- 
phy of the fathers, but because it lias gained strength through 
the difficulties it has experienced, and shown its beneficence through 
its practical applications. We have undoubting confidence that we 
have the brains and whatever physical strength may be necessary 
to work it out completely, no matter how wide the territory over 
which the flag floats and no matter how many or how diverse the 
people who live beneath its beautiful folds. And we surrender no 
tithe of all this when we raise the question whether, in the severity 
of our determination to avoid the subordination of the many to the 
few, as in other lands, we have not gone too far towards the other 
extreme and advanced conceptions which, acting upon the suscep- 
tible and ambitious temperament of the people of the United States, 
have led too many to think that they can succeed by wits without 



28 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

work, and can manage the business of other people before there is 
evidence that they are able to manage their own. 

In our rhetoric and declamation every American is a king. This 
is idealistic, but very often it is misunderstood. For any practical 
end it lacks the necessary discrimination between kings and between 
people. On the whole, it must be admitted that the kings have been 
rather a poor lot, and on the whole it must be said, if we say any- 
thing about it, that we have plenty of people who are kingly in 
that sense alone. In the theory, the intent, and the outworking of 
our pure democracy, every man stands equal with every other man 
in the making and the protection of the law. But that is far from 
all. The rest depends upon himself. As to the rest, he is unequal 
with other men. And the rest is largely in liquid state until it is 
given form and consistency in the schools. 

The schools have many fallacies. The boys are pointed to the 
millionaires, to the inventors and discoverers, to presidents of banks 
and railroads, to military and naval heroes, and to the presidency 
of the nation. One who lacks ambition for these places is deemed 
to be hardly worth the counting. Ambition, training in the cultur- 
ing studies, wits, and luck, are thought to be the stairs to eminence 
and glory. Yet the men who have reached altitudes by such means 
are rare in the extreme, and with rare exceptions they have been 
unsubstantial and unreliable when they got there. The men who 
have attained eminence and held it securely have been hard, severe, 
long-continued, uncomplaining, and unrelenting workers. The 
signboards at the crossroads, in the courses of the schools have 
pointed the boys to professional occupations. The road to these 
seems easy to a boy, and it is a rare boy that will not choose the 
easier thing. Yet, as a good friend, a natural lawyer, an honored 
judge, and a senator of the United States, wrote in my autograph 
album when I was a law student, " The successful lawyer, above 
almost all other men, must earn his bread in the sweat of his brow." 
The physician who is not a systematic, joyous, seasoned laborer, is 
a dangerous character to have about your house. It is so with 
clergymen and engineers and bankers and merchants, and all the 
rest who make any real impression upon life. 

The schools not only overlook or undervalue the processes which 
are essential to any success worth talking about in commercial, pro- 
fessional, and political life, but they are exceedingly undiscrimi- 
nating about the situations in life which are of most account to the 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 29 

particular liver, as well as about the studies and processes and the 
hard labor by which they are to be reached. The man who has a 
craft and comes somewhere near being the master of it, is to be 
envied in comparison with the man who has got into a bank or a 
printing office and can not get to the fore in it. And the man who 
has developed a farm, with all its interesting and inspiring attri- 
butes, is a veritable king when compared with those who have taken 
rooms in the basements of the professions. Neither the successful 
craftsman nor the efficient farmer has to ask special favors. Both 
grow balanced and hardy through the demands and the limitations 
of their work, and both are doing work which the world has to 
have. Both are as independent as need be, and independence makes 
for influence and respect in the common life. 

But the control and direction of children have been much re- 
laxed, and we have had a pretty hard attack of something which 
has struck at educational values, rejected known roads, indulged in 
novel speculations which can be neither demonstrated nor disproved, 
points to everything and gets nowhere. 

The trouble with the schools, certainly the lower schools (and 
there is trouble with the lower schools, at least) is that they lack 
definite aims, unless they are aims which ought not to appeal to 
more than a moiety of the people. They do not train into the child 
the habit of taking extreme care, and they do not demand clearness 
of process and completeness of result. They do not sufficiently 
recognize the imperative demands of labor and exactness as the 
essential basis of a national system of education. So much must 
come first, in any event, and after that there may be free choice, 
when the child is old enough to make a choice. There is not only 
the lack of the essential foundation, but also of the opportunity for 
the subsequent free choice. The overwhelming influences of the 
schools are all in the direction of a superficial culture, although sus- 
tained and successful work is the instrument of all true culture; 
and of professional and managing vocations, although the places 
are overfull. Children have to leave the schools to escape their 
trend. If they do not leave for that purpose, they certainly do leave 
because it is not made worth while for them to stay. Only one 
third of the children in the elementary schools continue to the end. 
Only a part of these go to the high schools ; only one third of those 
who go to the high schools remain beyond the second year; and 
only one sixth to one tenth of those who go continue to their 



30 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

graduation. All the rest drop out along the way, either because 
the majority of our people have a low estimate of the advantages 
of education, or because they think that it is more to their advan- 
tage to have their children leave school than to remain. 

It is not saying that a child should not have his free choice in 
determining what he shall do, nor is it implying that he shall not 
be helped to any opportunity for which he wants to try, to say 
that there is exclusiveness and repression in such a situation, and 
that in the outworking of our democracy in our education the 
forcing of children to such an alternative as that must disappear. 

Freedom of choice does not imply that all our children shall have 
a literary or professional training; it does not demand that in all 
parts of the country there must be the same kind or the same 
grade of schools; it does not demand that in its name children shall 
be guided into vocations that are overstocked, or for which they 
are not adapted; it does not demand, most certainly, that children 
shall be led into vocations that misfit them, or given the alternative 
of going, without training, into a vocation which they might want, 
and which it would be profitable to the country for them to have. 
The demand of our democracy is for equality of opportunity. We 
have gone too far or we have not gone far enough. We can not 
avoid the question. We can not escape the attitude of the Constitu- 
tion ; but perhaps we may understand it more perfectly. The de- 
mand of the economic situation and of common justice, that there 
shall be schools suited to the needs of all people and leading to all 
manner of vocations, will have to be heeded. 

The fact is that we men and women of the schools keep close 
track of one another. The news of the schools is all printed and 
we read it. We travel a great deal. We each undertake to keep 
up with all the rest. The discussions have all been of the same 
general character, and the projections have all been in one general 
direction. We have each added whatever subjects of a culturing 
curriculum the people would stand, and brought in all the incidental 
novelties, the conventions could suggest. The school boards have 
been almost paralyzed. Obstacles to education are not allowed in 
this country ; but may not some obstacles to some education in some 
places be healthful ? There has been skepticism, but no man of the 
world has felt just confidence enough in his skepticism to say 
bluntly, " Pull that building around square with the world before 
we go any further about it." 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 3I 

Schools to Suit Conditions 

We are eternally conforming and standardizing. What we need 
is not schools that are alike, but principles that are fundamental 
and schools as diverse as the conditions are. Of course, all schools 
must have standards, but they must be standards of sense, stand- 
ards of character, standards of information, and not standards of 
uniform courses, or uniform methods, for all the schools of a state 
or of the country. The universal comparisons between state sys- 
tems and between city systems, and the universal effort to have as 
good as any other state or city has, lead to results which are as 
remote as can be imagined from the needs of the greater part of the 
constituencies of the schools. What is needed is to bring the 
teacher and the parents and the children near enough together to 
make it possible for them to understand the needs and make the 
most of the possibilities of one another. 

For years the tendency of one enthusiast after another in the 
community has put more and more upon the schools. There are 
societies to effect everything that ever developed in a dream, and 
an average school superintendent or an ordinary school board is a 
weak defense to the onset of a society of enthusiasts, particularly 
of women enthusiasts. Politeness and platitudes have to suffice, 
when policemen and fortifications are necessary. Newspapers agi- 
tate, just as a matter of " newspaper policy," which means a policy 
that will sell more papers. A mere sentiment comes to be a 
" cause " of the people, and what confuses and takes from the con- 
centration and efficiency of the schools gains a place in their cur- 
riculums. 

Authorship and the publishing business play a part in the multi- 
plicity of studies, and a worse part in prolonging and attenuating 
studies beyond their right. The school life of the child is within 
limits of age. It is none too long. It is precious time. Whatever 
takes more than its right, subtracts just so much from something 
else that is vital to the rounding out of the child's life to its utmost. 
Whatever does not give him added power to do makes for insip- 
idity and saps his strength. Say all we will, and say it truly, about 
a child needing a complex education to fit him for life in a complex 
civilization, the fact remains that the things which make for com- 
plexity should not be permitted to begin so early as to endanger 
his imperative need of oral and written language and of the simple 
processes of mathematics. 



32 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

We are a considerate and tolerant people. For a score of years 
good people whose minds seem to live in an inflated atmosphere 
have pretty nearly monopolized the attention in the schools where 
teachers are trained. In the colleges and universities — their 
proper field, if they have a proper field — their doctrines and propo- 
sitions are rather sharply resisted by other departments, and the 
zone of their research and confusion is healthfully circumscribed. 
But "researching" in the normal and training schools has few 
limitations, and the consequent uncertainty attains a density that 
brings average minds to prostration. The effect upon the young 
girl teachers is pathetic. They are not only called upon to do 
more things than they can do in order to meet the demands of 
enthusiasts, but they are invoking the aid of occult sciences, and 
feel obliged to accomplish ends by constrained methods and devices 
which are destructive of that freedom which is the essence of 
effectiveness in teaching. Useless illustration and exploitations con- 
sume time, if they do not obscure the point and defeat the end. 
Out of it all the children do not have trained into them the ability 
to do some particular thing. The parents are confounded. The 
school boards have become nearly helpless. The general public is 
restless and anxious. 

It is imperative that there be a closer adaptation of schools to 
situations, and that schools have more and longer control over 
children, and move forward to definite ends. There is much being 
said now, and it is necessarily said, about the development of 
technical and trades schools in the towns. But that is but one mani- 
festation of a wider difficulty. 

The schools must meet the needs of a particular people, whether 
these needs are high or low, academic, professional, commercial, 
agricultural, or manufacturing. We can not expect the people to 
adjust themselves wholly to schools. We must adjust the schools 
in very considerable measure to people. For some reasons it is 
better to describe a farm by saying that it is in the northern half 
of the 20th section in township no. 9 in the north range no. 3, 
west of the 6th prime meridian, as they do in Nebraska, than it is 
to say that 63 acres, more or less, are in the town of Long Lake, 
in the county of Aroostook, and bounded by stone fences or lanes, 
monumented by a blazed tree, a deer's antlers, a fox's hole, or a red 
heifer, as they may do in the Maine woods. But one system will 
have to prevail until a better one comes in, and there are more im- 
portant things than prime meridians in locating boundary lines. 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 33 

when the lands go down in the family, and you don't have to give, 
and nobody wants to take, a mortgage upon them. It is well if 
people have got far enough to need and to support high schools 
and colleges, but if they have not, there is even greater necessity 
that they shall have elementary schools suited to their exact needs, 
and whether they have or not, their elementary schools must be ad- 
justed to their conditions and look forward to their work, or the 
bottom will fall out of the high schools, or there will come an 
educational cleavage which is repugnant to that theory of govern- 
ment which has been the backbone of our prosperity and is the hope 
of our future. 

We hear a great deal about consolidating schools and carrying 
children long 'distances to central schools, in order to have graded 
schools and finer buildings. It is well where the people with such 
lights as they have, or will have, want it so, but there is no peda- 
gogical reason why it should be forced upon them. There are diffi- 
culties about children being carried several miles to school, and 
there are pretty strong reasons why it is well to have a school within 
walking distance of every home. Graded schools have troubles of 
their own. A school does not have to be a big school in order to 
be a very good one. The teacher who has to reckon with the 
life of the family and the outlook of the child, may be, and often 
is, doing much better teaching than the teacher who is bent upon 
conforming her processes to the creed of a training school or the 
philosophy of the books, without such an understanding of doctrines 
as will enable her to know that dogma is not of much account where 
it fails to meet situations. The percentage of strong and balanced 
characters who come out of the country schools, where the teach- 
ing is personal and direct, is greater than that of similar characters 
growing out of schools where classification is imperative and the 
teaching necessarily much less personal and direct. IV.Iodern con- 
veniences are lessening the difficulties of the country schools. 
There is no overwhelming advantage in huddling people or pupils 
together more than they do it themselves under the necessities of 
the case. And it is a great pity that there is so much educational 
confidence or courtesy as to keep some doctrines about conformity 
in education from meeting with something like the frigid reception 
which bulls about conformity in religion would encounter in the 
General Assembly of my church. Sweeping generalizations are as 
inapplicable in one field as in the other. 



34 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

This principle holds as good in the upper schools as in the lower 
ones. Some are " standardizing " American universities just now. 
You can not standardize American universities any more than you 
can standardize the color of American apples, or the height of 
American women. There are apples that command the top of the 
market even though they are not red, and there are women who are 
mighty, even though they do not approach the altitude of the Broad- 
way squad of the Metropolitan police. So there are colleges and 
universities which are first-class, even though they have less than 
a thousand students and do not attempt many things that the larger 
ones make much of ; and there are others which are second-class or 
third-class with two thousand or three thousand students, who are 
offered everything that can be named in an educational bill of fare. 

Classifying and standardizing are difficult and often dangerous 
processes in this country. They are impossible in American educa- 
tion. If it is a mere matter of association or congeniality none 
will object, for that is a harmless matter of feeling and of tastes. 
If it is a means of educational helpfulness, it well might use better 
descriptive words. If it is a process of discrimination, of exclu- 
siveness, of depreciation, then it must end where all meanness 
in education eventually does. There is no conclusive argument 
against the big college or the little college, the rich college or the 
poor college, the classical college or the industrial college. It is a 
question of fitness and eflficiency, of adaptation and of accomplish- 
ment. No matter what other attributes it may have or may lack, 
that college is of the first rank in America which sends its flag 
furthest into the ranks of ignorance and meanness by turning out 
the largest percentage of true and productive men and women. 

A few years ago Harvard University put the entrance require- 
ments at the schools of law and medicine upon the basis of an 
approved baccalaureate degree. That was well. The schools suf- 
fered somewhat in attendance, but advanced scholarship gained by 
it. Then other universities discussed it, some attempted it, and a 
small number accomplished it. It was all well enough. But there 
was an assumption in the discussion that a move which might be a 
good one at one institution must therefore be good at another. That 
is not necessarily true. By far the greater number of professional 
schools could not exist upon that basis, and it is desirable that such 
of them as are honest and doing the best they can shall exist. All 
intending professional students can not follow a prescribed course 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 35 

of scientific training until they are twenty-six or twenty-eight years 
old before they are allowed to begin practising a profession, and 
all people can not afiford to pay the fees which professional men 
so trained feel entitled to exact. You may tell me that I am stand- 
ing for the lower rather than the higher ideals in scholarship. No, 
I am standing for the rational, the serviceable, and the fruitful 
ideals in scholarship. I am standing for schools that can serve the 
country. I am glad that some institutions are reaching the highest 
altitudes, glad that the time has come when students no longer 
need go to foreign universities for the very best instruction. But 
every school is to have its chance, and every student is to have his 
chance. You may well believe that the time will never come when 
all or nearly all of the great men in any profession will be enrolled 
in the alumni of a single professional school, no matter what its ad- 
mission requirements may have been. A full proportion of the 
great men will always come from small or weak schools in which 
there is some ordinary teacher who fires their lives. Schools are to 
meet situations that exist, and uplift constituencies of their own. 
They can not do that by merely copying or conforming. 

Lack of Aim and Efficiency 
The advanced schools, or their departments, have become so much 
differentiated that each has a very definite aim. By the time 
students are old enough to enter them they have gained rather clear 
purposes, and they select the school and the department which can 
do for them just what they want to have done. That is so in some 
measure, though much less so, with the middle schools. They are 
too often afflicted with more of a desire to undertake the natural 
work of the colleges and the professional schools, which they can 
not do well because they can not have the instructors, the equip- 
ment or the basis of preparation for it, than they are endowed 
with a proud ambition to do the legitimate work of schools of their 
grade, so that when pupils have finished it is known that they are 
in possession of the information and the power to do some definite 
thing which can be given a valuation in the world of education and 
in the world of fact and of affairs. Still, the pupils who remain 
after the second year in the high school do begin the process of sat- 
isfying ambitions which have begun to take definite form; and if 
they are clear enough of vision and strong enough of purpose, they 
often find the helps of which their particular ambitions stand in 
need. 



36 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

There is practically nothing of this in the elementary schools. 
That is a most serious and menacing fact in American education. 
If it is said that there can not be, because of the immaturity of the 
pupils, it is answered that there is no such difficulty in other great 
national systems of education, and that the pupils are quite as im- 
mature there as here. The only aim in our lower schools is the 
grade above, and the one above that, and the road leads either to 
intellectual culture without any definite vocational aims, or to em- 
ployments that are professional or at least semiprofessional in char- 
acter. As a result the multitudes tire of it. The minority follow it, 
and, notwithstanding the steadily increasing exactions, more gain 
access to the professional and managing vocations than is good for 
them, good for such vocations, or good for the country. But the 
majority quit the road all along the line because they can not see 
that it is going to lead to any definite acquisition that will make it to 
their advantage to remain. 

It is a very common impression among the poor, and among 
some who are not so poor, that there is really more advantage 
to the child in going to work than in continuing in school. And 
if there really were work for them, and if they were actually being 
trained into it, how many of us could justly say that the conclusion 
is devoid of reason? But the grave fact is that the sixty per cent 
of the children who drop out of the elementary schools without 
finishing them are not prepared for any definite work, no matter 
how simple, and the work they do find does not lead to self-im- 
provement, because it is of a kind which grinds the heart and bone 
out of them for the enlargement of dividends. 

There are other facts associated with this one which must be 
mentioned but need not be argued. Any great work having rela- 
tion to both sexes imperatively claims the cooperative effort of both 
men and women. The number of women teachers, the consequent 
low basis of wages, the agitation about equal pay for similar work 
in spite of all economic and educational considerations, and partic- 
ularly the pernicious manipulation of party politics by organizations 
of women teachers in the larger cities, is preventing, speaking gener- - 
ally, the stronger men from engaging in teaching, and is forcing out 
some who have already commenced. For obvious reasons it is a 
menace to that balance in the work of the schools which is impera- 
tive to the interests of both boys and girls who are to form ambi- 
tions and find employments in a balanced world. 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 37 

The doings of the primary schools in the great cities have undue 
influence upon the operations of the primary schools in the entire 
country, and this is particularly illustrated in the growing disposi- 
tion to make a teacher's position a comfortable subsistence for life, 
protected by law, rather than an imperative and responsible instru- 
ment of common needs and of the best public opinion. Of course 
it has groA^n out of the very largeness of the system, and of the 
unjust and reprehensible treatment which has sometimes been in- 
flicted upon teachers by weak, or worse than weak, superintendents 
and boards of education. It all illustrates the difficulties which jus- 
tice and effectiveness have to encounter at the hands of democratic 
government, and it particularly exemplifies the importance of 
thrusting all partizanship out of the management of the schools. 

These things contribute to a situation which wastes the lives of 
pupils. With the unnecessary studies, the undue prolongation of 
studies through a series of books in a single study, and the 
undue emphasis upon mere methods and exploitation ; with the fact 
that the pupils are not reaching forward to some definite thing in 
which they are interested; with the further fact that the home is 
no longer of much help because the character of the home has 
changed and because the work and processes of the schools are so 
changed that parents are unable to comprehend them, there is little 
wonder that the work is often behind the age of the pupil, as it is. 
Then there is the further fact that there is a very common national 
indifference if not repugnance to enforced attendance upon the 
schools. So there is no lack of explanation of the wastage in the 
work of our elementary schools, and of a percentage of illiteracy 
m the United States whicli exceeds that of any other favored 
nation in the world. 
? 

"All Men are Created Equal " 

What is the matter and what is to be done ? Our democracy has 
often been misinterpreted and misunderstood. It is not strange 
that it has been misinterpreted, because there is no other democracy 
like it. Something very important happened in this country on the 
4th day of July 1776, and because of that, some things even more 
important have happened since. Our independence enlarged the 
freedom of a people who inherited and never gave up their full 
share of the liberty of the nation which had gone further in 
making laws, and in defining human rights under human laws, than 



38 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

any other nation in the world. Independence of itself gave us some 
rather inflated ideas about freedom, and those ideas have been still 
more inflated by the rather loose thinking of the millions who have 
come to us with the notion that freedom was offered and exempli- 
fied by the absence of the army or of the police, more than by the 
free play of moral sense, the equal rights of all, not some, of the 
people, and the binding obligations and limitations of moral as well 
as civic law. The trouble has been that in the prevalent thought 
freedom has been regarded without much concern for the founda- 
tions upon which it must rest, and the limitations within which it 
must operate, and the processes by which it must be enlarged, if it 
is to be secure or is to be enlarged at all. 

For a familiar but excellent illustration of this, see the difficulty 
we have in getting children in and keeping them in the schools. 
The attendance upon school is more irregular in the United States 
than in any other nation with whom we would be willing to be com- 
pared. It is not merely because there are people here who are 
indifferent to schools. There are such in all nations. It is not 
because we have more of these than other nations have. It is 
because the measure of control is less here than there, and because 
of the common misunderstanding in this country of what freedom 
truly is, and of how it is to be retained or enlarged. In a word, it 
is because public sentiment is not quick about seeing the need, nor 
keen about sustaining the processes for enforcing attendance upon 
the schools. We hold out more freedom of choice than do other 
peoples. Our schools attempt more than theirs. They do what 
they undertake more completely than we do. The habit of sending 
all children to school is much better established with them than 
with us. It has been established by law and by force. Our fal- 
lacious reasoning about freedom forces upon us a percentage of 
illiteracy several times larger than that of any other well organized 
and well governed country in the world. 

What is to be done ? Laws and educational systems — and edu- 
cational systems are one expression of laws — have to be recast 
frequently in order to correspond with the growth and progress of 
peoples. It is not necessary to conclude that our national and po- 
litical fundamentals are wrong, as some seem disposed to do. It is 
only necessary to give those fundamentals a rational interpretation 
and erect a more perfect superstructure upon them. 

One says, " Everybody who is well informed now sees that the 
declaration that 'all men are created equal" is only a o-Htterincr 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 39 

platitude." This is not true. That phrase was neither a perversity 
nor a pleasantry. Far from its being mere rhetoric or bombast, it 
is, in my conception of the great soul of the nation, a tremendous 
basic fact, and I am proud of being one of the people who have 
confidently entered upon and successfully moved along the rugged 
road to its most complete realization in human history. I do not 
believe that the men in the Continental Congress were either 
capable of mere bumptiousness or incapable of expressing what they 
intended in very good English phrase. Of course, their manner of 
expression was of their day and generation. Within that limitation 
they succeeded very well in expressing the things to which they 
pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 

Has any one ever supposed that, when they declared as a politi- 
cal truism that all men are created equal, they intended to say 
that men are equal in height or in width or in weight? Has any 
one supposed that they intended to say that all men are equal in 
the tenseness of their feelings, or in the direction and the strength 
of their thinking? Or has any one imagined that they intended to 
be understood as thinking that all men are equal in their possessions, 
their attributes, or their opportunities? Washington's armies 
fought for no such idle contention, for no such absurd ideal, as 
this. It was a lawyer's phrase. It was the phrase of good lawyers 
and it was a good phrase. The lives and training of the men who 
framed it, the only logical hypothesis upon which it can be made 
consistent with all the other things they said, and the only inter- 
pretation which makes the Declaration worth the struggle of the 
Revolution — all combine to make it clear that the laws of this 
country were to guarantee all men and women an entire equality of 
legal protection and legal right, that the common power should not 
be used to keep one down nor to lift another up, and that the laws 
of the land should articulate with God's justice in holding out to 
every one the legal right to the equal chance to make the most of 
himself. 

All that we have to do in order to enable our schools to promote 
our national ideals is to go back to the fundamentals of our political 
faith, square our theories with their obvious intent, and create in- 
strumentalities which enable rational ideals to run their natural 
course, as the waters of the uplands follow their even channels to 
the sea. 

Every xA.merican child is to have his chance. It is not to be 
thwarted by any law of the government or any usage of the people. 



40 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

It is not to be long hindered by the lack of educational instrumen- 
talities which may aid it. Of course, the large factor is in the 
personal qualities which are looking for a chance, which can recog- 
nize a chance when they see it, and which have wits, and force, 
and endurance, and patience enough to make the most of it. But 
these are not the only factors. A child's destiny is not settled in this 
country by the circumstances of birth. It is a great thing to live 
in a land where experience proves that riches quite as much as 
poverty, the city quite as much as the country, and conceit quite as 
much as necessity, are barriers on the roads to the elevations. But 
even this is not all. A child's future is not to be clouded or 
obstructed by any assignments which a teacher may make, by any 
false valuations of the prizes of life, by any fallacious theories 
about the kind of success which is of the most worth, by any wasting 
of his time in order to accommodate the rigidity of an organiza- 
tion, or try out the vagaries of pedagogical speculation, or by any 
forced misfits which must logically follow official, legislative, or 
professional misconceptions of the relations of our democracy to 
the free opportunities of men and women. It is time to stop prac- 
tising upon children in the schools ; it is time to stop implying that 
work with the head is better than work with the hands ; it is time 
to stop forcing them into grooves which satisfy notions that are 
too common, but in most cases lead to a loss of every kind of 
efficiency and to ends which are alike humiliating to the individuals 
most concerned and opposed to the general welfare of the nation. 
It is time to put the emphasis upon work, no matter what it is 
about ; it is time to inspire expertness, no matter what in ; it is 
time to help qualities adapt themselves to productivity, no matter 
in what direction. Charity is not to be confused with the work of 
the schools. The right to an education is inherent. With that 
right the child must sink or swim, and more will swim if there is 
no confusion about it. But the schools must reach every child, no 
matter whether his parents will it or not. We must have more 
definite aims, and we must assure more concrete results. We may 
expect the complexity of the educational system to meet the com- 
plexities of our modern civilization, but in some way each school 
must have a simpler life which will help, and not confound, all who 
are concerned in it. Every American child must have an open, free, 
clear, legal, American chance. So far as he is constrained or 
guided, it must be only in aid of his own freedom and in the direc- 
tion of his own best possibilities. 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 4! 

Uniformity in Principles 

To help every one gain his best chance, we must know what we 
are after. We must have a better understanding of the principles 
which we are trying to make good. 

Every child, every one in the land, must be recorded, to the end 
that his rights may be assured. 

Every one must have an elementary education, and, before every- 
thing else, an elementary education must mean the power to read 
and write and master the simple processes of mathematics. 

The school must have equal respect for every manner of Avork. 
It must know that without application and endurance there is no 
hope, and that with them there will be some result of just as much 
moment as any other result which it might have gained. 

The work of the school must have definite aim, and its ends must 
be assured. There is too much scattering. Before a child is per- 
mitted to leave the school it must be known that he has a definite 
possession which never can be taken from him. The schools must 
carry him as far as under the conditions of his life they can be of 
help to him. 

The schools must train for every vocation for which there is any 
reasonable demand, and the child must be under the control of the 
school until there is ground for confidence that he has some need 
of finding his chance, some desire and application, some fitness for 
employment which will enable him to begin to earn a living. 

The child must be allowed his free election of vocation after he 
has acquired the simpler work of the elementary schools. But he 
must know that he is not to drop out and not to be allowed to 
waste his time, at least until he reaches an age or a situation where 
the case is apparently helpless and hopeless. 

The work of each school, being simpler and more definite, must 
be more intensive. Unnecessary time is consumed. It is worse to 
waste the time of a child than to take away any other right that he 
may have. He must get the larger part of his culture through his 
work. It will be a finer and truer culture than can be gained in 
any other way. What culture comes through mere instruction is 
well, but it is secondary and must wait upon the essentials. The 
same with mere information : if he has the elements which give him 
the power to get it, he will get it when he needs it or when he wants 
it. If he does not, the public can not help it. 

All of the children of the United States are entitled to be taken 
out of the list of the illiterates and to be tauefht to do some definite 



42 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

thing, and to be made to know that their success depends upon 
their doing it better than others do. Then the unexpected and the 
surprising successes will doubtless be multiplied, and, whether they 
are ot not, the nation will be the stronger. 

Diversity in Means and Methods 

With some reasonable agreement about the measure of oppor- 
tunity which the educational activities of the nation are bound to 
hold out to every American child, and with our abundant knowledge 
of what is going on in every part of the country, there will be all 
of the uniformity that is desirable, if we encourage the freest 
diversity and individuality in means and methods. It is not necessary 
that the schoolhouses be of the sarhe height and color. They need 
not all have heating plants that balk when called upon for special 
effort, and forbid an open window at all times. The schools do not 
all have to have identical courses of study, and there is no reason 
why they should use the same books. The teachers do not have to 
have the same convolutions in their brains that have formed in the 
brains of those physiological psychologists who fall down in their 
physiology and get beside themselves over their psychology. It is 
of less moment what one knows when he enters a school than what 
he knows when he leaves it. It is enough if he has the power and 
the will to do the work. With some reasonable promise of that, 
he is to have his chance. The most unpromising freshman often 
develops into the particular star of the commencement morning. 
Tliere are to be standards, but they are to be the standards of indi- 
vidual institutions. The degrees of all the colleges ought not to 
be expected to represent the same thing. We are to prevent fakes 
and frauds. It is well for a state to protect academic terms from 
such abuse by fixing the attributes which an institution must have 
before it can hold itself out to be a high school, an academy, a 
college, or a university. But, being within the legal requirements, 
and being honest, it must find its own level and abide its own doings. 
The pupil, the student, and the teacher, are to use the means they 
have or can get, in their own way, to their own advantage, and to 
the common good. 

The glory of the American school system is in the fact that it is 
not to be fixed, and shaped, and determined, and limited by a 
minister, but by a representative government answerable to a pure 
democracy. It is in its flexibility, its adaptability to all conditions. 
This leads some to confuse the process of determination with the 



UNIFORMITY AND DIVERSITY IN AMERICAN EDUCATION 43 

process of carrying out what has been determined upon; or, in other 
words, to confuse legislative with executive functions. We are to 
develop policies which hold out to every one his chance, by the use 
of the best means we have, and having estabHshed the policies and 
appropriated the means, we are to exercise whatever of the common 
power may be needed to accomplish the designated ends. But we 
are never to forget that the worst results are likely to flow from 
adopting methods which can not be adapted, and from setting up 
instrumentalities which do not fit situations. The sanguine tem- 
perament, the prevailing ambition of the people, may be relied upon 
to do its part; but if temperament and ambition be unwisely played 
upon, there is danger of unfortunate result. The information we 
have of world education, the intellectual and physical work we have 
to do, the logical adaptation of people to work, the free chance for 
all, the obligation to reduce illiteracy to an absolute minimum and 
see that no child is robbed of his right, and the natural rather than 
forced flow of our national life, will combine to produce an educa- 
tional system which is much broader at the base than at the top ; 
which makes the most of the child and accomplishes some definite 
thing for him; which makes him know that he must work, aids his 
choice and fits him for his best vocation, and carries him as far as 
he wants to go in acquiring a balanced conception of life, as well as 
in mastering what is in the books. 

Conclusion 

I recall a good story which President Roosevelt tells upon him- 
self, in one of his hunting tales, of an exasperating experience with 
blacktail deer. At the sunset of a weary day a fine buck appeared 
at an opening in the woods at the sky-line of a mountain, and 
within fair rifle shot. The President fired both barrels, and says he 
heard his guide heave a sigh as the deer threw up his head and 
trotted ofif unhurt. Directly another appeared at the same opening, 
and he grasped another rifle and gave him the possibilities of two 
more shots. The guide sighed clear to his toes as the deer bounded 
away unhurt. In disgust which words could not express the two 
mounted their horses and started for the cabin. After going a mile, 
the guide gathered his courage to oflfer consolation. " Never mind ! 
I s'pose ye done the best ye could." " No, I'll be blanked if I did," 
was the answer. The expletive was justified. It was not the best 
that he could do. He has made few so bad, and many better, shots 
since. If we admit that we have made many miss-shots, let us 
believe that they have not been the best that we can do. 



FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND 
TRADES SCHOOLS 

REPRINTED FROM THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEW OF APRIL I908, BY COUR- 
TESY OF THE EDUCATIONAL REVIEW PUBLISHING COMPANY 

It can not be doubted, and ought not to be disguised, that the 
early and general belief (before the days of public high schools 
and so many colleges) that the elementary school system was 
amply adequate to the needs of the country has been much shaken 
in the last quarter century. It is not because of the lessening of 
either highly trained or popular interest in education; indeed, it 
is because all manner and grades of education have become more 
and more a passion with all classes of our people. It is not because 
of any waning confidence in our educational theories, or in the 
basic principles of our public schools. The " equal chance for all " 
becomes more and more valued and jealously guarded as our funda- 
mental political theory works its way out in our governmental 
practices. The American people have become so accustomed to 
making and managing schools that they have but indifferent interest 
about those in which they do not have some sense of proprietor- 
ship. But common sentiment, uncertain for a long time, has 
reached a very confident belief that new situations have arisen 
which the elementary schools do not reach, and that something 
rather decisive must be done to adapt their work to the possible 
expectations of children who are not going to the high schools. 
It is seen that they must have more definite aims, and must make 
sure of more exact industrial conclusions, if they are to meet the 
imperative needs of the children of the wage-earners, as well as 
the economic, intellectual, and moral necessities of the country. 

This development ought not to surprise us. It has come upon 
schedule time. It is in the natural order and it is healthful. Schools 
supported and managed by the public can hardly be expected to 
anticipate conditions or to outrun popular needs. Neither the fore- 
sight nor the warnings of the schoolmasters make much impression; 
In their essentials the schools respond to public opinion. Before 
they create new social states they are the instruments of older social 
situations. New understandings stir and solidify sentiment, and 
then the school boards and the schoolmasters make the plans for 
giving effect to it. 

[44] 



FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 45 

The situation results from the fact that every American is en- 
titled to his chance, and because of American temperaments and 
ambitions. We tell the children in the schools that they are of 
small account if they neglect their chance. They hear less about 
increasing their efficiency in ordinary undertakings than they do 
about going higher up. The " higher up " refers to lawyers, and 
surgeons, and engineers, and masters of great works, and admirals 
in the navy, and the presidency itself. The schools which are 
thought to lead to these positions are literary and classical; if they 
are scientific, their interest is only in the sciences which are vital to 
the professions. Our high schools are therefore literary and scien- 
tific in this sense. It is true that they have done a little something 
in manual training, but they have taken good care not to do 
enough of it, or not to do the kind of it, which would create the 
danger of their pupils learning a trade. About all of our educa- 
tional activities have led away from craftsmanship. We have gone 
on training for the professional and managing vocations until the 
educational system is unbalanced. If we were to train for vocations 
at all, we were bound to give all vocations an equal chance. Either 
we have not seen the greatest need or we have not dared to do the 
thing most needed because it was not in line with the usual inspira- 
tions and ambitions. We have made ourselves believe what, when 
generally applied, was fallacious and simply impossible. We have 
misled children and that has made misfits. 

For perhaps three decades we have had a vague notion that there 
was something wrong about our educational system because so many 
children were going away from the manual industries. To meet 
the difficulty, we have, in an awkward kind of way, and without 
any very consistent theory or any very definite plan about it, added 
manual training annexes to our high schools. We have listened 
to the manual training leaders with some condescension because we 
have realized that something in the direction of what they were 
talking about was desirable, but we have listened to them with so 
little confidence that (in order to float at all) they have had to 
spend most of their time looking out for snags. The people who 
do things only or mainly w^ith their heads have looked upon the 
manual training exhibits with a kind of admiration which was not 
psychologically any too clear, and the real mechanics have viewed 
them with feelings in which skepticism and amusement were mixed. 

We have placed the little work in our schools which has any 
application to manual dexterity so high up in the system that the 



46 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

children who are to work with their hands never see it, and we 
have distinctly said that our manual training schools were not in- 
tended to train for any particular vocation. We have even said 
that they were to be nothing but culturing institutions which would 
develop all the attributes of the human being harmoniously, and, 
very particularly, that they were to quicken the intellect by increas- 
ing the dexterity of the hand. In practice we have kept faith with 
this theory, for the public educational system of the country has 
taught no trades, and, without intending any slight, it must be 
added that its industrial schools have been arranged and taught by 
men who were essentially theorists and not specially skilful as 
craftsmen themselves. The result has been that our industrial 
training until now has had' practically no relation to our common 
hand industries. 

Of course the public school system has exerted some very desirable 
influences and accomplished some very good things. It has done 
something towards preparing pupils for the higher technical schools 
and the mechanical colleges. It has recently begun to establish 
advanced technical schools in the larger cities which have many 
factories where the work is done mainly by machinery. Nothing 
can be more desirable than keeping the operator ahead of the 
machine. That has not gone beyond a half dozen cities, however, 
except in discussion, and in a discussion which deems it prudent to 
avoid issues with the labor unions by asserting its good purposes 
not to teach trades. While much has been done in the public 
educational system towards training for professional vocations and 
positions of leadership, practically nothing has been done in the 
way of training hand workmen. The net result has, on the whole, 
actually discredited real craftsmanship. 

The public school system has shunted this thing off so persistently 
and completely that private philanthropic and proprietary schools 
and a few of the great manufacturing establishments have taken 
it up, either as a charity, or for gain, or from necessity. But private 
schools have made, and are likely to make, but a slight impression 
upon the large problem, for the American people are too much 
accustomed to proprietorship in education to give much adhesion 
to schools in which they have no fixed rights. 

While this situation has been developing, the old way of training 
boys for work through apprenticeship has practically disappeared. 
Employers do not want to be bothered with apprentices, and work- 
men not only have some of the same feeling but are apprehensive 



FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 47 

about more workmen lowering wages. On both sides the motive 
relates, in much greater measure than it should, to the present hour 
and to immediate profits or wages. Even the number of appren- 
tices approved by the rules of the labor organizations is not being 
trained in the factories or the trades. 

Meanwhile the manner of family living has greatly changed, and 
girls in vast numbers, wdio are no longer trained in the household 
arts, are becoming generally inefficient, or are seeking public employ- 
ments at low wages, and excluding boys therefrom. 

With all these things, and some other things, the primary schools 
are in trouble. They are better supported and better organized than 
ever before. They are taught by teachers who are uniformly better 
trained for their work than ever before. But specialists and en- 
thusiasts have overloaded them with work and theories that con- 
sume time unprofitably, and they undoubtedly come short of meet- 
ing some of the most urgent needs of a new situation. It is not 
that all of the difficulty is outside of the schools. Some of it is 
inside. They are to be judged frankly but truly. And, anyway, the 
real question is. what is the matter and how can it be mended? 

It has been widely assumed that the children in the elementary 
schools remain to finish them ; but not more than one third of them 
do so. At least, that is so in the cities, and in the country there is 
neither beginning nor end. Half of the children in the primary 
schools of the cities do not go beyond the fifth of the eight grades. 

The law compels attendance only till the age of fourteen, and 
parents often reason that obedience to the mere letter of the law 
is all that is necessary. Not a few parents fall short of that ; and 
the people in general give very little support to the officers who try 
to enforce the attendance laws. 

We not only need to modify our ideals about the work that is 
of the most worth to the country and its people, but quite as much 
we need to take a reef or two in the sails which we are presenting 
to the breezes of freedom. In any event, some authority will have 
to assume control over children, and we shall have to come squarely 
to the point of requiring children to be in school when they ought 
to be there. No nation has ever prospered which did not do that, 
and we are not likely to be an exception to the universal rule. 

Then, the primary schools have no definite aim unless it be to 
send children to the high schools, and thus to some professional 
or managing vocation, and wage-earning fathers are not much 
interested in that. Thev reason, doubtless, that their children will 



48 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

not be better prepared by staying in school to earn a living in the 
way they must earn it, and that they might as well try to have them 
pick up some earnings at once. 

Again, it must be admitted, I think, that the schools are behind 
the ages of the children. A boy at fourteen becomes restless under 
the direction of a woman teacher, and tires of the work which 
is set for him in the fifth grade. If the studies in the elementary 
schools are not too many, they are certainly too much drawn out. 
There are too many books in one branch and there is too much 
rather fanciful exploitation. The educational conventions give too 
much time to novelties. There are so many conventions that the dis- 
cussions run afield. The schools illustrate and experiment too 
much. They are indifferent about the time of pupils, and they do 
not fit children for any definite work unless it is professional or 
semiprofessional. So, two thirds of the children do not remain to 
finish the primary schools, and, even though they remain to the 
end, there is much complaint that they are not prepared to do 
any definite thing unless it be to go to the high school. 

The high schools and academies, the colleges and universities, 
the advanced technical schools, and the professional schools, which 
are either public or exact only low fees and offer many scholarships, 
are more than adequate to the training of all the " professionals " 
or " intellectuals " that the country can use. Indeed, they are so 
overstocking the professions with misfits, and turning youth from 
craftsmanship, that if the thing goes on indefinitely the country 
must be the poorer by it. 

But there is a rather virile democracy in this country. It has not 
yet gone so far in education and industries as in politics and re- 
ligion. It is getting under way, however. It wants all that belongs 
to it and intends to have it. It is being waked up by the trades 
schools and all of the industrialism of Europe, and particularly of 
Germany. It sees that in twenty-five years the German exports of 
home manufactures have grown more rapidly than the American, 
notwithstanding the great expansion of our occupied territory, the 
great enlargement of our towns, and the splendid intellectual 
advance of our population, and it does not fail to see that labor 
and skill are larger factors than materials in making it so. It is 
beginning to discern the fact that the universality of labor and the 
development of skill are great factors in generating moral and 
intellectual power in men and women, and in adding to the strength 
of nations, as well as in operating factories and in enlarging profits. 



FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 49 

Our democracy is beginning to complain that the school system 
discriminates in behalf of the well-to-do and in favor of the intel- 
lectual employments. It really sees that there is less actual 
democracy in education in America than in some countries which 
have kings ; that in some inscrutable way we have done more for 
the top of our educational system, which has few votes but is best 
able to care for itself, than for the bottom, with more votes and 
less power; and it reasons, erroneously no doubt, that the part 
which was best able to care for itself has done it with some selfish- 
ness. If it was through selfishness, it was as misguided as selfish- 
ness usually is. But our democracy takes little account of reasons, 
or of processes, or of mistakes. It sees a situation and is bent upon 
changing it. 

Happily these thoughts are not monopolized by any class of 
people ; nor is this democracy exercised by any exclusive set of 
people. The interests and opinions of all classes are at last coming 
into accord. It is seen that there must be a new, a far more diver- 
sified, and a much more universal industrialism ; and it is also seen 
that there is no escape from the fact that the public schools must 
be made to take the burden of it. 

The newspapers and conventions are declaring for " industrial 
training," the schools and charitable institutions are trying to meet 
the demand, states are legislating for it, and a national organization 
has been established to promote it. 

The only hesitating interests are the corporations and the labor 
organizations. They have to think about where they will come 
out in such matters as profits, and bread and butter ; and, with 
reason enough, based upon experience, they are skeptical about the 
schools being able to train real mechanics and turn out real work- 
men. The hesitating interests may be expected to be willing to 
experiment, however, under the pressure of popular opinion and 
in the presence of a great national movement. Certainly so in view 
of the fact that we have reached the point where there is no longer 
any efficient agency outside of the schools for training workmen; 
and where it is clear enough that the schools, with some reconstruc- 
tion, may do it much more satisfactorily than any other instru- 
mentality that can be provided. 

What shall be done? First of all we must have a plan. It must 
be definite. It must have all of the support that can be brought 
to it. To that end it must be fundamentally sound. It must be 
based upon our democratic philosophy and it must be work- 



50 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

able. It must not avoid issues. It must be a plan which 
will commend itself to the interests of capital and which 
will appeal to the sense and reason of labor. It must help 
capital to safe and profitable activity ; and it must hold out the 
utmost of opportunity to the children of the poor. It can not do 
that if in any way it aids one at the expense of the other. If it 
is a real educational advance it will go, because no one in America 
can then stand against it. One who hinders the opportunities of 
capital is a fool. One who would lay sticks in the way of any 
son or daughter of the nation making the most of himself or 
herself is not an American. Even though his blood traces back to 
the Mayflower he is an alien and not of us. The clock is striking 
the hour for the full exploitation of our democracy in our education 
and in our industries, and no one shall stop the wheels or turn the 
hands back upon the dial. But the plan must be thoroughly 
American. It can not be English, or French, or German, no matter 
how much there may be in their systems to commend them. Their 
ideals and their methods are not ours, for the inherent thought of 
the Republic is very exclusively its own. It will be absurd not to 
have full information. It will be ridiculous to reject what will 
serve us simply because another people has worked it out before 
we have. But there is no other people with our outlook and ex- 
pectations. We may adapt but well may be cautious about adopt- 
ing. Essentially we must create. And if we go ahead in the spirit 
of the Republic, guided by its political philosophy, we may do it 
without fear and with confidence. Any arrangement which does 
not articulate with the work of the elementary schools, and which 
does not recognize the need of progressive continuity, with some 
definite aim, from the first grade in the primary school up to the 
point where the child is capable of earning a living, will not succeed 
or endure. Of course it involves much recasting of the plan of the 
elementary schools. They will have to be relieved of many studies, 
of much tiring attenuation and repetition in the same studies, 
of much psychological speculation and wearying preaching about 
methods in teaching. In the elementary schools, at least, the teach- 
ers will have to be allowed to teach, and not be kept from it by 
officials who are wandering and wondering about what kind of 
teaching is of the most worth. The value of the time element in 
the life of the child will have to be recognized. He will have to 
be taken in hand early, taught exact things, given power rather 
than information, and pushed along rapidly enough to be in pos- 



FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 5 1 

session of the implements of an intellectual Avorkshop by the time 
he is fourteen years of age. The class of work which the school is 
doing will have to be abreast of the age and capacity of the pupils, 
and public sentiment will have to refuse to tolerate the superintend- 
ent or the teacher who wastes the life of a child. More regular 
attendance must be exacted, more intensiveness put into the work, 
and the child brought to the end of the essential parts of the present 
elementary course by the time at which the law now allows him to 
leave the schools altogether. Then, in all considerable towns there 
will have to be established a wholly new order of public schools. 
These new schools will have to come immediately after and connect 
with the work in the primary schools. They will have to teach 
trades. They will have to respond to the local situation, teaching 
any trade when, say, twenty pupils apply for it. From the very be- 
ginning the elementary schools will have to have this in view. Aside 
from, these schools, teaching individual trades, it will be necessary to 
develop another kind of school of a more general character for the 
children who are to go into the offices and stores and factories. 
The evening schools, which have got started upon a very indefinite 
plane, may be utilized, but they will need much more support and a 
substantial reorganization. 

We must cease declaring that we are attempting only to train 
all-around mechanics, trying only to dignify labor, trying only to 
culture the mind through the hand, and have no thought of teach- 
ing those who are to work with their hands how to do something 
definite. That is the very trouble with the schools now. They are 
without exactness ; they are profligate of boys and girls ; they lack 
definite ends which the masses may see are worth gaining. They 
must advance from " manual training " to technical schools and 
trades schools. The " culturists " must not be allowed to appro- 
priate the technical and trades schools to their own refined uses. 

If the trades schools are to succeed they must have the sympathy 
and aid of the labor organizations. And they will have that aid 
and sympathy if they are at least as much shops as schools ; if they 
magnify doing and minimize talking; if they are taught by artisans 
who can establish their power to train, rather than by theorists who 
are indifferent mechanics ; if they really prepare children to begin 
work, and train out of them the conceit that they know all that 
can be learned only through much work and many years ; and 
if, in the imfortunate but inevitable contentions between capital 
and labor, they stand fair and evenly helpful to both. The 



52 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

higher technical schools must of course multiply and strengthen. 
They are the main hope of superior products in factories where 
the work is done by machinery, and it is hardly too much to say 
that they are the main hope of superior manhood and womanhood 
in a land given to invention and almost submerged in machinery. 
But they have little to do with the great army who are to work 
outside of factories and without machinery, in carrying on the 
building industries. There is no conflict. Let us have whatever 
kind of a school the interests of a town demand. It is only neces- 
sary to recognize the fact that the common power must establish, 
and the common purse must support, schools which will qualify hand 
workers quite as much as head workers, for their vocations; and 
that schools which do it must be flexible enough to meet local sit- 
uations. It seems as though the trades schools and technical schools 
must have oversight and necessary control over children for three 
or four years after they finish the primary schools and until they are 
seventeen or eighteen years of age, but not so far as to preclude 
them from regular employment and some wages. The industrial 
schools will have to be open afternoons and evenings and have such 
time of the pupil as he can give, with a minimum of four or five 
hours each week, and the employers will have to reckon with this 
public exaction upon the time of the pupil. As a child comes to 
the end of the elementary school his parents and he may well elect 
whether he shall go to a trades school, or to a technical school, 
or to the high school, or to work. If he has a liking for hand 
work and is in a nonmanufacturing city, he may well choose a 
trades school; if in a manufacturing city, he will probably go to 
work in a factory, unless he has a fancy for a particular trade. 
It should be quite possible for him to take advantage of a trades 
school, or of a technical school, or of an all-around evening school, 
where the work will be of real interest to him. And in any event he 
should be required to respond to the oversight of the schools until 
he is prepared to begin, and has gained some interest in, an indus- 
trial vocation, or has started on the road towards a professional 
vocation, or has proved that his is a hopeless case. It will be said 
that all this means many more schools, many more buildings, the 
training of many more teachers, the recasting of present courses, 
great changes in the common thought and the common talk, much 
new legislation, and much additional expense to municipalities and 
to states. Of course that will be said. And it will be true. But 
there is no transgression about the movement that will have to be 



FROM MANUAL TRAINING TO TECHNICAL AND TRADES SCHOOLS 53 

repented of. It has no smack of paternalism, or of socialism, 
or of charity. It does not make gifts. It does not provide din- 
ners, or clothes, or even medical attendance, for anybody. It means 
nothing but work. It preaches the gospel of self-dependence and of 
self-respect. Having gone as far as we have, to be just we must do 
this much more. It is now within the rights of every child, as much 
as the elementary and the secondary schools are within his rights. 
But even that is not all. The rational equilibrium between the ex- 
clusively intellectual and the decidedly industrial interests of the 
country must be restored and can hardly be restored without it. 
And not only the industrial efficiency, and the strength and balance 
of the nation, but the moral and intellectual health, and the solidar- 
ity, and soundness, and aggressiveness of the nation seem to de- 
pend upon it. The democracy of the nation will have to do it. 
Even more, the success of democracy rests upon it. 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN 
UNIVERSITIES 

ADDRESS AT THE COMMENCEMENT EXERCISES OF THE UNIVERSITY OF 
MAINE, JUNE 9, 1908 

The differences already well developed in the universities of the 
older and the newer states of the Union, and the relations which 
those differences sustain to the history and the outlook of each 
university and of the people of each state, make as fascinating 
a chapter as any to be found in the absorbing story of American 
education. And the futures of the institutions to which such dif- 
ferences point, and the bearing of those futures upon the common 
and progressive community life in the East and West of the country, 
are as encouraging to those who have interest and confidence in 
the body of the people as they are bewildering to those who are 
unable to suppress a shiver at the natural advance of democracy 
in America. 

The departures of our newer universities from the foundations, 
the government, the plans, and the ideals of the older ones are many 
and decisive enough, but there is no reason why they should be 
very surprising. The evolution of universities in all countries has 
been very consistent. Political and economic conditions have ordi- 
narily given them form and outlook, and the general intellectual 
freedom and balanced sanity of their constituencies have determined 
their undertakings and gauged the true value of their accomplish- 
ments. Our universities in the newer West have responded, and are 
responding, more readily and decisively than those in the older 
East to the universal rule. The reasons for this are discoverable. 

An institution whose function is to prove a thesis rather than 
to find the truth is not a university. An institution set up to propa- 
gate a spiritual philosophy, or a political theory, or a scientific 
belief, or a cult of any kind, is not a university. An institution 
limited by social exclusiveness, or religious bigotry, or overheated 
partizanship of any kind, is not a university. An institution which 
merely polishes the rich who will never gain much strength through 
work, never know the pleasure of real accomplishment, never have 
the genuine culture which grows out of association and service, is 
not a university. Of course, universities will propagate religious 

[54] 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 55 

philosophies, and political constitutions, and scientific opinions; of 
course, universities will support some partizan views and activities, 
as they will discourage others; and of course, universities will minis- 
ter to one community, and sometimes to one class in a community, 
more than to another : but unless an institution puts the truth above 
theory, while it repels the fanciful and unsubstantial; unless it 
opens the door of opportunity to all, while it aids the intellectual 
interests of every part, and applies scientific principle and fact to 
the doings of every class; and unless it seeks the light of all knowl- 
edge, quickens all who may come within its influence, and takes the 
initiative in drawing men and women into it through reaching out 
and doing things, it certainly lacks the essential attributes of a 
typical university in America. 

The intellectual advance has been along a rough road. Some- 
thing had to occur which would put faith above submission, and 
doing above dreaming: that something was Christianity. Some- 
tliing had to occur which would set the world in motion : that some- 
thing was Protestantism. Then something further had to occur, 
because the new religion became as intellectually unrelenting as 
the old : that something was denominationalism. Then toleration, 
that is, freedom for all religion, and obedience to law rather than 
force, had to come ; and that was constitutionalism. With this, 
men had their chance and study gained its free opportunity. In- 
vestigation, discovery and invention did their splendid work, made 
the accumulated knowledge of the ages available to all, and proved 
that concord was better than strife, and that cooperation was yet 
better than competition in helping on the great ends of civilization : 
and that is modernism. 

Names and forms are often misleading. There is more real 
democracy among some peoples who live under monarchial forms 
of government which they have inherited, than among some peoples 
who live under republican forms which have grown out of acci- 
dent more than intelligent design. There is more real subservi- 
ency among some peoples whose government is republican in form, 
than among other peoples whose government is monarchial in form. 
But wherever real religious freedom is and is valued, there intel- 
lectual freedom and civic freedom find an abiding place also. And 
where these have come to be, there the noblest universities have 
developed and there they have steadily grown, through the increas- 
ing volume and strength of the mighty forces which support them. 

Nowhere have these forces sprung into luxuriance of life more 



5^ NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

freely or more rapidly than in this country. Nowhere have uni- 
versities responded to the freedom and the force of democracy 
more admirably than here. In no other land has the building of 
new states marked the advance of democracy, of constitutionalism, 
of modernism, as has the march of the armies of pioneers in the 
last half century from' the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, across 
North America. And nowhere else in all the world has the birth 
and the progress of real universities illustrated the universal rules 
of intellectual progress as they are exemplified by the advance of the 
tax-supported university movement in America. 

The mental processes, the optimistic temperaments, the disposi- 
tion to tolerate one another and to work together for the upbuild- 
ing of common institutions, everywhere manifest in the Mississippi 
valley. Rocky mountain, and Pacific coast states, and very often in 
the Southern States, are further removed from those which prevail 
in the North Atlantic States than those which are common in New 
England ;-re removed from those which were common in Old 
England at the time of the Puritan revolution. The Western 
States have had a free intellectual field, and they have had the 
kind of people who knew that they possessed the political power, 
and were not afraid to make the most of it. They have had solid 
satisfaction in sacrificing and suffering to the end that their insti- 
tutions might be .better than any others, and that their children 
and their children's children might fare better than they themselves 
did. Their S].irit has been transmitted and diffused: it prevails 
universally. They are not only disposed ; they are informed. They 
know infinitely more of the East than the people of the East know 
of the West. They not only know: they are determined. That 
is the reason why in every state from the Ohio river to the Pacific 
coast, there is a real and a free university which has built upon the 
old models where it would and departed from them when it liked, 
and thereby well expresses the age, the strength, the intelligence! 
and the aspirations of the state. And their thinking is such that 
they would be ashamed if it were not so. 

Colleges came quickly after the beginnings of the English settle- 
ments m America. They were ecclesiastical and denominational. 
They were not only Puritan or Cavalier, Conformist or Noncon- 
formist, but their chief ends were the mere creeds and forms which 
the sects worshipped. Classical literature and sectarian theology 
measured the breadth of their arbitrary courses, and dogmatic 
mstruction and catechetical inquiry as arbitrarily fixed the limits of 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 57 

their intellectual freedom. The independence of America propa- 
gated sects, and sects propagated sectarian colleges. Opposed as 
these were to any learning which did not support the theses to 
which they gave their lives, there was energy in the very rivalry 
and hope in the very opposition. Learning made some headway; 
real religion had a better chance; the common needs and the com- 
pounded sense opened the way for toleration, and the absolute 
demands of respectability, if not of existence, made policies which 
rendered imperative the leveling or the ignoring of the fences 
between the sects. Progress came in the natural order. 

In the early days religion and politics, the church and the state, 
went together. It had not yet developed that there could be a 
democracy of learning in an autocratic state, or that learning could 
be fettered through constitutions and laws and usages which assume 
to be very democratic and free. Indeed, there were those in high 
station who were foolish enough to think that they could use a 
college to fetter freedom, for an English court granted a college 
charter to what is now one of the greatest and most justly hon- 
ored of American universities, in order " to prevent the spread of 
republican principles which were already become altogether too 
common." It was part of a fatuous but fruitful policy; in twenty- 
five years the gun which signaled the greatest democratic advance 
that mankind has ever known in learning as well as in political 
progress " was heard round the world." 

The early secondary school system, that is, the academies, of the 
Atlantic States, was projected from the top down, rather than from 
the bottom up as it was in the West. It sprang out of the need of 
the colleges for feeders, rather than out of the impulse of the 
masses for higher schools. The earlier colleges and academies 
were naturally, and perhaps necessarily enough, aristocratic rather 
than democratic institutions. They followed the English political 
thought and the English educational plan. The public high school 
movement was infinitely more democratic than aristocratic and it 
developed relatively very much earlier and very much more freely 
and luxuriantly in the West than in the East, because there it found 
a more democratic atmosphere and did not meet the indiflference 
of the leaders of education and the active opposition of institutions 
already upon the ground. 

The early colleges in the West, like those in the East, were eccle- 
siastical and denominational, but commonly they were little more 
than high schools, and often their support was so precarious that 



58 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

they could assert but little opposition to a popular educational ad- 
vance. In practically every case the tendency to advance educa- 
tionally was so democratic and popular as to be overwhelming, no 
matter what the sectarian opposition or educational blindness. 

Every western town grew up with an enthusiastic purpose to have 
all that the East had educationally, with something to spare. The 
East felt sorry for the West, and the spirit that would go West 
could not endure that. In every town, from the Ohio river to the 
Pacific coast, the most conspicuous building is that of the public 
high school, and it seldom happens that that building does not 
shelter a school which is quite as well organized and quite as effi- 
cient as the school in any eastern town of similar size and equal 
wealth. Very often it is better organized and much more efficient. 
And it must not be forgotten that the towns all the way to the 
Pacific coast are no longer small, and certainly it must not be 
overlooked that they are no longer poor. Very generally they have 
come to be strong and rich, and very commonly their high schools 
are the best expression of their wealth and their intellectual prog- 
ress. There is a keen and universal pride in the institution, a sense 
of common proprietorship in it, and a wide appreciation of the 
fact that it is a unique American institution, a " people's college," 
a connecting link between the public schools and a real college or 
a real university, all of which is much more marked than in the 
Atlantic States. 

Soon the Western States came to be quite as enthusiastic about 
colleges as about high schools. The natural order proceeded. It 
was stronger because it rested upon the earth and grew upward. 
Long before the Civil War, nearly every western state that had 
then been admitted to the Union had come in with a provision in 
its constitution for a state university, and since that time there has 
doubtless been no exception whatever. It was no mere form. In 
nearly every case that provision has been conscientiously and gen- 
erously observed. The result appears in a very systematic, a very 
coherent, and a highly efficient state educational system with a con- 
tinuing road leading from every primary school through sixteen 
grades to the graduate school in the state university. 

It will not do to assume that the western state universities estab- 
lished in the constitutions, and, in fact, before the war, were merely 
low grade industrial affairs. They were more classical than indus- 
trial. They did not at first break away, to any great extent, from 
eastern and old world ideals. They were organized, planned and 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 59 

administered, in nearly every case, by classical scholars. Of course 
they were under democratic influences and of course they soon 
began to bend to the practical needs of the people of their states, 
but it took long years to break away from the roads which edu- 
cational conventionalism had made for them, and break out the 
new roads which would give learning its largest and widest oppor- 
tunity among a people who had put themselves at the fore of 
national progress. But in time they found the way to realize their 
fundamental political thought and give every one his chance ; 
and they also found the way to put those universities to the uses 
of democratic states. 

Before the Civil War there was no real university in this country, 
either East or West — that is, real in its strength, its offerings, its 
outlook, its freedom, and its spirit. The greatest uplift which has 
ever come to university education in America, or in any land, came 
in the Federal Land Grant Act on the darkest day of the Civil 
War. The day after the awful disaster on the Chickahominy, the 
day upon vvhich Lincoln called for 300,000 more men and hundreds 
of millions more of money, he made a law of the act of Congress 
giving to each state for higher education 30,000 acres of land for 
each senator and representative that the state had in Congress. 

There has been much discussion, and there is yet some, as to 
the intent of this act, as between classical and industrial education. 
The discussion is now academic and no longer fascinating. The 
intent has been construed and determined in action accomplished. 
In spirit and situation the West was able to take the benefits of the 
act much more clearly and strongly than was the East. Fathered by 
a Vermont senator, it was yet essentially a western act. It pro- 
ceeded from the agitation of Jonathan Turner, an Illinois teacher. 
The act laid down some conditions. Three or four things must be 
done. There was little or no eastern sentiment in favor of those 
things, and the educational puritanism at Harvard and Yale and 
Columbia and Princeton was too solemn and ponderous to com- 
promise a classical orthodoxy for lands or money. The act con- 
templated that each state should use its avails to enlarge existent 
institutions, or join forces and build up new institutions. The New 
England States managed in one way and another to get hold of 
the proceeds of the federal act, but they have never entered into 
the spirit of it. It is doubtful if any one of them has given as much 
to the joint enterprise as it has received from the federal 
grants. It is certain that they have never made the most, nor much, 



6o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

of them. The spirit of New York was no better; perhaps not even 
as good. But the scholarship and intuitions of Andrew D. White, 
formerly a professor at the University of Michigan, and then in 
the New York Senate, and the philanthropy and sagacity of Ezra 
Cornell, then also in the New York Senate, did something to save 
the State from its annoying indifference and stupidity. 

Beyond the Alleganies, moneys and opportunities have never been 
allowed to escape. In many states mechanical and agricultural col- 
leges were annexed to colleges of liberal arts already established. 
In others technical colleges were started, and, where this was done, 
classical attachments were soon added. As a consequence, there 
is no state west of the Ohio river which does not possess, and is 
not committed to, a common university for common ends. In its 
foundations, and generally in its superstructure, it is a real univer- 
sity. Whenever a new state has been formed, it has come into the 
Union with plans for a common university, as well matured and 
as strongly sustained as the state's plans for common schools. All 
learning is the universal passion. It is hardly too much to say that 
there is no state beyond the Ohio which has not supplemented the 
federal grants with much more than it has ever received from them,, 
and it is certain that many of those states give much more to their 
universities every year than they have received from the general 
government from the beginning. 

Of course there are results ; and of course the results are largest 
where the democracy is the freest, where there is the most unity 
of ambition and of purpose, and where the people hold the initia- 
tive and the power and are fully aware of it. The country will in 
time discover, if it has not done so already, that that is the most 
encouraging factor in our national life. 

It is not possible to name any number of higher American insti- 
tutions, in the order of number of teachers and of students, cubage 
under roofs, libraries, laboratories and equipment, range of offer- 
ings, recognized standards of efficiency, number of degrees con- 
ferred, annual revenues, and influence upon life, without finding 
that more than half of them are tax-supported institutions. Forty- 
one states have institutions which confer the A.B. degree; the five 
others have institutions which do not confer this degree, and four 
of the five are in New England. No one can justly say that the 
'growth of democratic universities in the United States is not one 
of the most marvelous and gratifying movements in the entire 
history of world education. 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 6l 

The phases of this movement which exemplify its democracy are 
more surprising and significant than are its proportions. The com- 
mon assumption, the inherited tradition, of the old universities is ex- 
clusiveness. They have decided what learning is worth propagating : 
only choice spirits of their own selection have been admitted. The 
tests of admission have related exclusively to the things which 
they are accustomed to do, rather than to universality of oppor- 
tunity ; to culture, rather than to the work which makes for culture ; 
to the mere ability to pass written examinations set by teachers 
who know nothing of the other attributes of the candidates, rather 
than to the general qualities and experiences which make it reason- 
able to expect that the candidates will do their work. The funda- 
mental basis of tax-supported institutions is that all learning is of 
worth which bears upon the common life and applies scientific 
principles to the ordinary and useful occupations ; that every one, 
who has given evidence of desire and of reasonable capacity for it, 
shall have his opportunity; and that the institution itself must 
initiate movements, take up inquiries, and pursue policies which 
will quicken the intellectual activities, sharpen the moral sense, and 
help on the business interests of as many factors as possible in a 
constituency that recognizes no special privileges but worships 
universal rights. 

The lack of information, indeed the persistent misinformation, in 
the Eastern States concerning these institutions, makes it well to 
be exact. I will briefly describe one of them so that he who cares 
to verify may do so. It is not the oldest, or the largest, or the 
greatest. It is typical of the others — the normal product of the 
intellectual outlook, the industrial conditions, the prosperous up- 
building, and the religious freedom and virile politics which have 
grown up around the flag of the Union as it has moved to the 
westward. 

This university was established forty years ago. It was erected 
upon the " Grand Prairie," a great region Where ordinary farm 
lands are worth $150 to $200 per acre. It ov/ns and uses six hun- 
dred and twenty acres of the best land. It has cultivated and 
planted until it has as attractive grounds as any university in 
America. It has produced environing cities. It has twenty-five 
substantial buildings, and is adding one or two more every year. 
Probably it has more cubage under roof than any other educa- 
tional institution in the country. It has revenues of more than a 
million a year for operating expenses, without a dissenting voice 



^2 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

in the Legislature. It has more than 500 in its faculties and 
more than 4700 students taking courses in the university proper, 
in its colleges of arts, science, engineering, agriculture, law, medi- 
cine, and dentistry, and in its schools of library science, music, 
pharmacy and education. Associated with the university are the 
United States Agricultural Experiment Station, the State Engi- 
neering Experiment Station, the State Laboratory of Natural His- 
tory, the State Water Survey, and the State Geological Survey. 
Of course, most of the students come from the state, but more 
than forty other states and ten foreign countries are represented 
in the student body. 

But for ihe fact that some good souls have a hardened disdain 
for "cornfield universities," it might not be worth mentioning that 
this institution has rather more than the ordinary university equip- 
ment of fraternities and fraternity houses, sororities and sorority 
houses, clubs and clubhouses, dress suits and dress gowns, and 
all the other solidities and frivolities which offset the things that 
crucified the flesh in ancient scholasticism. Its ordinary procession- 
als are as impressively academic as one ever sees in an eastern state 
save when a new college president is inaugurated or a centennial 
is observed ; and its receptions are as radiant and as " formal " as 
ordinary people can endure. Its life is much in the open ; some 
form of athletics is universal. Its athletics and its intercollegiate 
contests have been clean. Harvard, Yale, Princeton and Pennsyl- 
vania are very well aware that it can play ball. 

For a dozen years much care has been given to the military 
department in this university. It is popular. It is in charge of a 
veteran officer of the regular army with a record which appeals to 
young men of spirit. All freshmen and sophomores drill about two 
hours a week. The cadet organization consists of a band of fifty 
men, an infantry regiment of thirteen hundred men, a battery of 
artillery with two field guns, a signal corps, hospital corps, etc. On 
occasions, such as a university celebration or the inauguration of a 
governor, it makes a profound public impression. On Saturday 
afternoons, once a month, through the winter it holds a " hop " at 
the armory. Young men and women go together, in daylight, and 
there is ndthing wonderful about it: they present themselves to a 
receiving line of members of the faculties and officers of the regi- 
ment, and learn, and observe, and are advantaged by, the forms of 
polite society. The military organization is wholesome and in- 
spiring. It " sets up " men : it makes one place at least where 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AAIERICAN UNIVERSITIES 63 

authority and obedience are absolute; and it appeals to the pride 
and patriotism, while it adds to the strength, of the state. 

In this university there is a Christian Association for men and 
another for women. They have probably two thousand members 
and own buildings, overlooking the campus, w^orth $150,000, which 
friends and teachers and students have given. And they are quite 
as active and efficient, and religion is quite as virile and as free, 
as in any denominational institution. 

It is but the truth to say that this university is the best expres- 
sion, and the best inspiration, of the great soul of a sane and prop- 
erly ambitious people, and of a prosperous and zestful state which 
is able to govern and proposes to do so. Happily, in nearly every 
other American state there is a similar exemplification and inspira- 
tion of the thinking of a people who know the throbbings of indi- 
vidual spirit and of a public soul. 

This university has recently been invited to membership in the 
Association of American Universities, which comprises the fifteen 
leading universities of the country. Its graduate school, or the 
university proper, has grown steadily since 1892. There are now 
one himdred and eighty students doing research work, and fifty- 
two other colleges and universities are represented. The last Legis- 
lature gave, without dissent, $50,000 per annum for additional in- 
struction in the graduate school alone. 

Now let us point out the very decisive differences between this 
and the traditional universities of the world. First of all, the warp 
and woof are of a wholly new kind of material. The atmosphere 
that blows across the campus has a new stimulus in it. It is a 
people's university: it is supported by the people. There is no as- 
sumption from that that every man who comes along, or every 
society that has a mission, can dictate its policies or coerce its action. 
Neither is there an assumption that a few men monopolize the 
knowledge of what is good for a whole people. Its trustees are 
elected at the general election, and are commonly reelected. They 
are not unreasonable in their thinking : never more than one or two 
at a time are disposed to selfishness, and such at once learn that they 
can not gratify their greed. The policies of the institution are 
wrought out upon the anvil of public discussions, at the council tables 
of the trustees and the faculties, and in the great forum of the state, 
and are expressive of the compounded thought of scholarship and of 
the whole people. The institution does not have to plead with donors ; 
it is not limited by conditions in deeds of trust: it does not Jw-ve 



64 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

to worship tombs. Its government is that of a constitutional de- 
mocracy; not even that of a constitutional monarchy. It is not 
fettered by crown, or cabinet, or minister; by primate, or caste, 
or party. It has all the factors of self -expansion within its own 
organization, and it has more liberty in working out its destiny 
than has ever been enjoyed by any other kind of university in the 
world. 

Tuition is free. It was the original scheme of the land grant 
act that, in order to make certain that all of its proceeds should 
be used for instruction, each state should provide buildings. The 
state did this and began charging a term fee of less than $25 per 
year to each student, to meet the expense of repairs to buildings. 
The need of this fee has long since disappeared, and, indeed, the 
reason of it has for the most part been forgotten, but its influence 
upon the student body has been so salutary that it has been con- 
tinued. When its abolition has been suggested, the students have 
protested and have taken occasion to propose the ways in which 
they would be glad to have the money used. But there are some- 
thing like a thousand meritorious and absolutely free scholarships, 
and the door never swings against a student because he has a lean 
or empty pocketbook. 

This democratic university is a part of the public school system 
of the state. It is the thirteenth, fourteenth, fifteenth and six- 
teenth grades in that system. Its officers and agents lay out the 
work of the high schools and inspect and rate them for organization 
and efficiency; then it admits to its work all who are certified to 
have completed the work in the approved high school courses : 
this ordinarily requires four years, but is sometimes done in three. 
The plan unifies the whole educational system. It keeps the high 
schools up to grade. Their faculties can not afford to have it said 
that their work does not have the approval of the State University. 
The admission requirements at the university have steadily ad- 
vanced: they are above the average of the leading universities. 
Still, the State University cares less about who is admitted than who 
is graduated. The western people want every one to have his 
chance. They say if he falls down after having his chance, it is his 
fault. The western students have a tradition that it is not difficult 
to get into a western university, but exceedingly hard to maintain 
one's self and get a degree ; while it is harder to get into an eastern 
university, but that one who gets in always gets through. There 
is something in that. In any event, the western method unifies and 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 65 

energizes the educational system, and affords the open chance 
for a college degree to an extent which is wholly unappreciated in 
the Eastern States. 

The western university is coeducational. In the one described 
there are a thousand women, that is, one in four students. There 
have never been any scandals. There is less foolishness on the 
part of one sex concerning the other than there is in either a man's 
college or a woman's college. There is no evasion. Men and 
women measure up in the presence of one another. Once in a 
while a " match " results, and in practically every case it is a good 
one. It is the only way of assuring entire educational justice and 
equality to women. It enforces university attention for the special 
interests of women as well as for those of men. Accepted in the 
spirit it is, it exerts a sane and keen influence upon all of the activi- 
ties of the university and upon many of the higher interests of the 
state. 

But perhaps a more potential difference than any other appears 
in the fact that the state university feels bound to take the initiative 
in promoting every intellectual interest, and in aiding every business 
interest of the people of the state. The common thought is not 
merely that the university is a place where students may go if 
some exclusive authority will let them in, but that it is a place where 
all who are qualified to partake of the highest, the broadest, and the 
most diversified learning may go as of right, and a place to which 
the people may turn for the solution of their problems, whether 
those problems are intellectual or industrial, whether they are public 
or private, and whether they concern the nation, the state, or a 
county, or municipality thereof. 

Its library school propagates libraries everywhere. Its political 
science departments supply information upon timely political and 
economic subjects. Its department of sanitary engineering tells 
towns how to lay sewers, and supplies specifications for pavements. 
Its department of chemistry analyzes several thousand specimens 
of drinking water for the people every year, without charge. Its 
department of railway engineering has test cars of its own running 
over all the steam and electric roads of the state to aid the com- 
panies in improving the right of way and in getting a maximum of 
speed and safety at a minimum of cost. Its department of me- 
chanical engineering shows the towns how to abate the smoke nui- 
sance. Its engineering experiment station works with the manu- 



66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

facturiiig and constructive interests to assure the best methods 
and machinery. Its colleges of medicine and law not only assume 
responsibility about training for, but undertake to guard the door- 
ways to, those professions. Its department of art looks after the 
drawing in all of the schools, and its department of architecture 
exerts an influence upon large buildings from one side of the state 
to the other. Its college of agriculture tells the farmers how lands 
may be put to more profitable use, how particular soils need to be 
treated, and what processes will put more fat matter into corn and 
into cattle as well. This spring the university I have referred to 
sent one of its leading professors to the Argentine Republic to see 
if some of the vast herds of heavy cattle in South America can be 
brought into our markets ; another to Denmark, to study dairying 
m the most successful dairy country in the world; and this summer 
it is sending its president to the different countries of Europe to 
get into the heart of veterinary science, with a view to the or- 
ganization of a great veterinary college for the benefit of a great 
city and a great state that have vast investments in the animal 
industries. Illustrations might be multiplied to the wearying point, 
but these few are sufficiently significant. 

Of course, men seasoned in the old conceptions of colleges and 
universities have things to say about this outworking of our de- 
mocracy in our higher education. They say, for example, that it is 
no function of the state to supply such advanced training. The 
overwhelming sentiment and the laws of the country have deter- 
mined that it is. They talk about the public universities having 
their " hands in the public treasury." It would be as senseless, but 
no more senseless, to retort that some people have their hands in 
private pockets. Ours is a representative democracy, and when 
so important a matter as this is well understood among the people 
for half a century, and the lawmaking power decrees it again and 
again with practical or entire unanimity, it is time to assume that it 
has the right to be and that it is well. 

Again, they say that the influence of a large institution upon the 
individual student is not so good as that of the small institution, 
that the stronger teachers are in the small colleges, and that the 
students come in closer contact with them. That is a matter of 
opinion. In my opinion the influence of the great institution is the 
better. The association with many other students levels conceits 
and stimulates ambition. There is great advantage in the multi- 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 67 

plicity of work, in the many entertainments, lectures, and discus- 
sions, m the innumerable activities of every thinkable kind. Students 
absorb much from the larger world and from the courses other than 
their own. The assumption that there are teachers of stronger 
character and firmer moral sense, and of better training and teach- 
ing power, in the smaller institutions than in the larger ones and 
in the older ones than in the newer ones, is wholly unwarranted. 
And the lack of contact between teacher and student in the larger 
institutions is purely imaginative. 

They say, sometimes, that the state universities are " Godless " 
because undenominational. On the contrary, religion is freer, re- 
ligious discussion more spontaneous, and religious activities more 
numerous and potential, because they are many-denominational. 
This consideration goes far in explanation of the unprecedented 
growth of the state universities. Real universities do not exist to 
propagate a creed or bind youth to a denomination, and most 
parents, who do not put sectarianism above religion and form above 
substance, think of this when planning about the future of their 
children. 

Yet again "tliey say," that the public universities are dominated 
by politics. Nothing could be further from the truth There is 
absolutely nothing of it. Of course, when a state is being formed 
and an institution is being born, the mere politicians will seek 
control of everything, and two or three instances of this in connec- 
lon with the formative period of public universities have attracted 
the a tention of the country. But even in such cases the imperative 
and fundamental principles of university life and efficiency soon 
assert themselves. The people quickly resent it. The state univer- 
sities which have got their bearings, as practically all have are 
wholly free from politics. Indeed, the people are exceedingly' sen- 
sitive about this matter, and the interests of all parties give the best 
assurance of protection from the depredations of politics And 
moreover it is but just to observe that the essential basis of a tat 
supported university makes it particularly independent of caste 
wealth social blindness, educational bigotry, party politics, or pa': 
tizanship of any other kind. ^ 

Still again, it is said tliat the state universities have grown up in 
states where there was a lack of colleges, and because of that fa t 
Th>s ,s not so. The states having the strongest state universitie have 
more good colleges than has any state in New England Ohto 
has th.rty, Michigan ten, Wisconsin eight, Minnesota d^^ht,' ll.fn™ 



68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

twenty-eight, of which t^vo are great universities with more than 
four thousand students each; Indiana fifteen, Kansas nineteen, 
Nebraska nine, Iowa twenty-four, Missouri twenty, etc., etc. But 
this is not all. It is a notable fact that where these other colleges 
have taken rather kindly to the principles of the state university, 
have recognized its right to be, have helped it along and been them- 
selves influenced by it, they have prospered ; and where they have 
opposed it, they have suffered. If notable it ought not to be sur- 
prising, for it accords with the universal rule in morals and educa- 
tion, that the best way to help yourself is to help another; but it 
is significant of the feeling and purpose in America concerning 
education. 

Once more, it is said or implied that the plane of scholarship in 
the state universities is low. That is a question of fact about v/hich 
it is better to seek information than to indulge in epithet. A fair 
sample of the minimum admission requirements in a state univer- 
sity is 15 units of preparatory work, a unit representing 180 recita- 
tions of 45 minutes each. This exacts four years work in four 
designated secondary subjects. The secondary schools are as effi- 
cient as similar institutions in the East. The students are as earnest 
and zestful. Few of them are very rich, and fewer still very poor ; 
they have come from good average homes, they are as enthusiastic, 
ambitious, and proud as any similar number of students anywhere 
in the country. The university offerings are even more numerous 
and varied than in the traditional universities. If there is anything 
that they want in the way of investigation or instruction, they can 
get it. It is true that the demands for classical languages, litera- 
tures, and history, are not overwhelming, but any who want them 
can get their fill. In the multiplicity of work of real human interest, 
bearing upon vocations and upon life and upon the prevailing 
activities and the common interests, or actually fundamental to real 
professions, the universities west of the Ohio are often far ahead 
of their eastern colleagues. They keep students much more 
regularly at work and their semester examinations are more ex- 
acting, arbitrary, and resultful. Often their law and medical schools 
are not yet up to the grade of such professional schools in the" 
East, but in the natural and political sciences which provide founda- 
tions to the professions, they are inferior to none. And they are 
breaking out roads with their professional schools and with all of 
their graduate work. 



THE DEMOCRATIC ADVANCE IN AMERICAN UNIVERSITIES 69 

Sneering at tax-supported colleges and universities evidences 
paucity of information, or logic that limps. Many new institutions 
have been developed in this country. Many old institutions have 
taken new form here. Oftener than otherwise this has been so in 
our pioneer life while our society was yet, as it were, in the liquid 
state. Educational ambition and freedom had some opportunity 
and made some headway upon the Atlantic seaboard, and in tlie 
early days of our history. The miles of sea and land between the 
habits and the organized life of the old world and the needs of 
the new world, gave some chance to progress and some opportunity 
to the instruments of progress, from the very beginning. Antl 
much happened in a colonial life which led up to, and gained, and 
was able to preserve, independence and nationality. But aside from 
that, there was not much advance in the way of religious toleration, 
or political freedom, or of educational organization, or of the ex- 
pression of a people's life in a distinctive literature, until after 
national independence. That not only made a rew nation but it 
made a new life. With it the march of great pioneer armies to the 
Pacific was commenced. Those armies have augmented in numbers 
and gained in strength as they have gone westward. They have 
had quite as much ambition and exaltation of purpose, quite as much 
information and intellectual power, as New England and New 
York in their pioneer days. They have found far richer lands, 
and far more productive mines than their fathers ever dreamed of ; 
and that fact has already become great in the nation's evolution, 
and is doubtless to be far greater. Material prosperity has given 
them the wealth with which to build and the strength with which 
to do. With all the newness, they have never lacked in the power 
to govern ; but even better than that, they have never permitted 
government enough to hinder or subvert the freedom of their 
intellectual and moral initiative. So, new and typical institutions 
of learning have grown out of the steady advance and the gradual 
unfolding of the nation toward the setting sun. 

The Atlantic States have often scouted these new institutions 
just as Old England scouted some of the early ideas of New 
England. But the result will be the same. Perhaps the most con- 
spicuous of these new institutions is the public university. It does 
not accord with the " New England idea " which a committee of 
the Legislature of Maine has defined as '' free public schools and a 
degree of compulsory attendance, with higher education and pro- 



70 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

fessional training at the cost of the individual rather than of the 
state." But the " New England idea " will have to give way. 
Wherever our society has become well congealed, there has been 
stout opposition to every advance of the mass toward higher educa- 
tion. New England and New York developed quite as stubborn 
opposition to the public high school as is likely to appear against 
the tax-supported university. The thing is going. The movement 
is now from the West to the East. The city of New York, the 
other day, dedicated buildings costing $7,000,000 for a new and 
free university. In twenty-five years' time the boys and girls of the 
East, as well as those of the West, will have their open chance in 
state or municipal universities as broad and as efficient as any in the 
land ; and cities and states will use universities to break out the 
roads for their own intellectual and industrial upbuilding. Very 
likely, in states where there are already excellent universities upon 
private foundations, there will be some adjustments to that fact on 
the part of the newer institutions ; but, if there are, there will have 
to be very considerable readjustment on the part of the older 
institutions also. The democracy of the United States is working 
its way out in education. Our circumstances are special and our 
tendencies very distinct. There is a spirit moving among the 
masses, and it will not stop short of the equal chance for every one. 
In the democracy of learning which is being erected in this 
country there will be ultimately no state lines, no zones of ignor- 
ance and learning bounded by rivers or mountains, and no barriers 
established by artificial exclusiveness. The basis of opportunity will 
be manhood and womanhood ; and the right to make the most of 
one's self will depend only upon the desire and the power to do. 
The time will come when every state and every considerable 
municipality will use a real and a free university to gain the great 
ends for which democracies exist. The higher learning will be still 
higher in the future than now. The assurance of it is in the open 
chance for all assured by our fundamental political beliefs and in the 
political power of the common people. 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY 
AND EFFICIENCY 

ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL EDUCATION ASSOCIATION, AT CLEVE- 
LAND, OHIO, JUNE 29, 1908 

Mr President mid Ladies and Gentlemen of the National Educa- 
tion Association, and, incidentally but particularly, you, my long- 
time friends of the Cleveland Public Schools: 

The honor of a summons to address this association, so com- 
pletely representative of American schools , so great in its history, 
and so wide in its influence, is accompanied by an obligation which 
one may well accept with hesitation and approach with humility. 
And when the subject assigned is one which has the attention of the 
nation and looks to the decisive re-forming of the schools, and 
particularly when it is one which lends itself to the round-table 
much better than to the general assembly, and, more particularly 
still, when you evince such a decided preference for song and violin 
as you have tonight, one must bespeak your consideration, if he does 
not fall upon his knees and plead for your patience. 

We are within the territory which the first great moral act of the 
Republic, looking to the upbuilding of the nation, in words as 
solemn as any a statute could employ, dedicated to freedom, to 
virtue, and to learning forever. We are met at the very heart of 
the " Reserve " where New England and New York pioneers, as 
sincere and forceful men and women as ever came out of the mass 
to seek opportunity and advance civilization, in prayer and act even 
more meaningful than an ordinance of congress, dedicated them- 
selves and their posterity to the propositions that men and women 
are created with equality of moral and intellectual, as well as of 
legal right ; that government is a common need and a common good 
when moved by moral sense ; and that government for any other 
end than the moral good of the governed deserves the enmity, 
rather than the adhesion, of men. We are met in a great, busy, 
prosperous city, which has never given over its moral sense, which 
has always been alert about its freedom, and which has therefore 
never been indifferent about its schools. 

And, while I well know that not a very large number will under- 
stand it, I am glad to feel assured that there are still some good 
people in this great throbbing city, and not a few fine teachers in 
its excellent schools, who will believe that grateful memories and 
fruitful recollections crowd to the fore as I look over this radiant 
assembly and offer another word about the things which this asso- 
ciation and this city hold to be of first concern. 



72 NEW YORK STATE EDUCi^TION DEPARTMENT 

A Message from England 

We have just had an illuminating message from an accomplished 
officer of the English schools. His distinguished service to educa- 
tion, our undiramed recollections of the inspiring address he gave 
us seven years ago, and his resultful work since then in relating 
schools to industries, have led us to insist that he cross the sea again 
and speak to us once more upon the subject which is claiming the 
first attention of our people and our schools. His message is timely 
because it comes out of the full information and the sagacious out- 
look of a man who has put his own country and our country under 
obligations to him: it is more helpful than it otherwise would be 
because it comes out of the life of a mighty people, whose estab- 
lished habits of industry, whose sane and steady thinking, and whose 
unbending passion for freedom and for right, have given point and 
force to their influence upon every sea and in every land. 

His message is none the less instructive because our national tem- 
peraments and political philosophies are at some points divergent, 
and because our dissimilarity of industrial conditions makes it im- 
possible to adopt it in every detail. It will be even more instructive 
if we are able to associate the universality of fundamental prin- 
ciples with inevitable national differences in political and material 
situations. It would be as fatal for us to assume that a scheme of 
school organization or a plan of procedure which is adapted to one 
country must be adapted to another, as it would be to refuse to 
believe that the universal laws of sense, and the universal gospel 
of work, are as binding upon one people as upon another. 

Half a dozen years ago it was my pleasure to show another dis- 
tinguished officer of the English schools about one of our American 
free universities. We wandered through offices, and classrooms, 
and laboratories, and libraries, and shops, and gymnasiums, and then 
we drove through long avenues of shade trees, until he asked me to 
stop that he might look about and get a comprehensive view of the 
whole at once. As it all gathered in his mind he said, " And do 
you say that all this is free to all the people, and supported by self- 
imposed taxes upon all the people ? " " Yes," I said, " and it is the 
tax which is voted without dissent and of which one never hears." 
He raised his face and hand, in expression more significant than 
his words, when he said, " There is nothing like it in human 
history." 

Even true, it was not all of the truth. One must have an eye 
quickened by the American spirit and clarified by American history 
to see at once all the parts of the educational temple of which that 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 73 

university is but one gem in a resplendent crown. No other eye can 
take in at a glance the universal systems of primary, and secondary, 
and collegiate, and professional schools, associated in an educational 
plan of unprecedented symmetry, closeness, and completeness, which 
affords to all the equal chance declared in our laws and enshrined 
in the hearts of all true Americans. 

Other peoples do many things better than we do. In some di- 
rections their schools are more definite and efficient than ours. It 
is surely so with the simple schools for the peasant people. But 
there are no peasants in America. No other nation grasps the 
doctrine of all education for all the people as we do. We will never 
let go of that. It is the hope and the heritage of the nation. It 
is the boon which our democracy holds out to the honest, the am- 
bitious, and the oppressed, in all the world. 

It creates difficulties, and we must admit them. All education 
for all the people has been self-expansive and has come to be ex- 
pressed in new ways with the advancement of the nation. We all 
know how situations and needs change in America. Plans laid 
yesterday have to be modified today. And remedy can not follow 
upon need as quickly in a country where conclusions must be 
reached through popular discussion and opinion must crystallize in 
free legislation, as in a country where a few do the most of the 
thinking and a minister or a cabinet exercises the political power 
for all of the rest. 

My friend who has preceded me will not imagine that I am so 
unmindful of English history as to assume that Britain is a nation 
where a few men do the thinking and exercise the power for all 
of the rest. She settled that at Runnymede and again at Naseby, 
and Dunbar, and Marston Moor, and more than once on Tower 
Hill. She not only settled it for herself but for us. And since 
England's best writer of history, in the best history of the American 
Revolution that has been written, says that American heroism saved 
English freedom, my English friend will not mind if I say that ive 
settled the question, for England as well as for ourselves, at Sara- 
toga and at Trenton and at Yorktown, and then at Plattsburg 
and again at New Orleans, and many times by the gallantry of a 
little navy upon the high seas. The proudest jewel in England's 
crown doubtless is that we learned so well the great lessons which 
her statesmen and heroes taught us, and then supplemented them 
with some experiences and some independence of our own. All 
the stars upon our flag are the brighter because we have defended 
our democracy and our security so well. The foundations and the 



74 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

buttresses of law are as firmly laid in America as in Britain, and 
they are no better grounded in any land. We are as sensitive 
about the learning and the independence of the courts as are the 
people who look up with keenest pride to the red cross of Saint 
George — and more than that can not be claimed in any land. 

England has always set us a fine example of industry. She has 
not juggled with opportuneness so much as we have, perhaps be- 
cause she has had less disposition to juggle, and less opportuneness 
to juggle with. Democracy, opportunities, and optimism have to be 
reckoned with in America: they often cause us to be misunderstood 
by England. 

Whether or not we have a fateful craze for wealth, we hold in 
special honor riches justly gained and sanely used. Our adven- 
turers and our weaklings gamble much upon the unlimited chances 
which the conditions present; a few win; the greater number go to 
" the deeps that are dumb." But the country is not all adventurer 
or weakling. The overwhelming sentiment is sane, and sound, and 
strong. We believe in capacity more than in chance, and in work 
more than in opportunity. We put manhood above either riches or 
poverty. We know that labor, and skill, and prudence, and steadi- 
ness, rather than great wealth, make the reliable character and the 
substantial citizen, and that these spring in the largest numbers and 
in the most virile type out of all education for the laborer just as 
much as for the millionaire, and for the commoner just as much as 
for the prince. 

Britain has something of that to learn, and so with her consti- 
tutionalism and with the unfettered intellectual freedom of the 
Saxon race she has her own educational difficulties. If the 
mother country has fewer new situations to deal with, she seems to 
have greater difficulty about the principles which will have to be ap- 
plied to all situations. The fact that her situations do not change so 
often is offset by the other fact that her more settled political and 
social organization yields less easily to the inevitable advance of the 
common people: and perhaps it is more than offset by the further 
fact that her statesmen are not quite as responsive to the demo- 
cratic advance as ours, and that she does not change statesmen as 
often or as easily as we do. But we will both console ourselves with 
the reflection that educational troubles are the proof of educational 
energy and the assurance of educational progress ; and we will be 
happy in the oneness of purpose which enables us to balance one 
another and quicken education in all the vast domains where the 
people understand the English tongue. 



THE ADAPTATIOX OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 75 



Lack of Industrialism in the Schools 

Americans are as free in their right of censure as in any other 
of their freedoms. The elementary schools are everywhere, and 
often they find themselves within the intellectual limitations of 
senseless criticism. The loosening obligations of domestic duty and 
the very weaknesses of the schools have produced an undue supply 
of people of superficial culture and of " professionals " without 
employment ; and the universal interest in education makes it quite 
possible for these to occupy themselves and perhaps gain a little 
standing by endless propositions about the schools. There is evi- 
dence enough that they are not slow to take advantage of it. The 
factors which these people have added and would add to the schools 
are the essential cause of a widespread difficulty to which it is high 
time that we address ourselves with determination and with force. 

When but one third of the children remain to the end of the 
elementary course in a country where education is such a universal 
passion, there is something the matter with the schools. When half 
of the men who are responsible for the business activities and who 
are guiding the political life of the country tell us that children 
from the elementary schools are not able to do definite things re- 
quired in the world's real aftairs, there is something the matter 
with the schools. When work seeks workers, and young men and 
women are indififerent to it or do not know how to do it, there is 
something the matter with the schools. 

The length of the school period and the productive value of the 
citizen are closely related. Industrialism is the great basis of a 
nation's true strength and real culture. Knowing this we have 
seen that there is not sufficient articulation between the educational 
and the industrial systems of the country. We have seen the in- 
definite expansion of instruction and the unlimited multiplication 
of appliances leading to literary, and professional, and managing 
occupations, without any real solicitude about the vital industrial 
foundations of the nation's happiness and power. A situation mani- 
festly unjust to the greater number, even unjust to those for whom 
it has done the most, has resulted. Notwithstanding our boasted 
universality of educational opportunity, there has grown up an ab- 
surd hiatus in the educational system, which denies the just rights 
of the wage-earning masses and grievously menaces the industrial 
efficiency and the material prosperity of the country. 

The overwhelming trend of the programs of the schools and of 
the influences of the tc?.cliers. acting upon our national tempera- 



^6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

ment and aspirations, has led an undue proportion of youth to 
hterary and scientific study which too often ends either in idleness 
and insipidity, or in professional or managing occupations for which 
they are not well prepared and which are already overcrowded. 

Nor is the inevitable disappointment the worst of it. There is 
a glare, a gamble, and a subtlety about it which is demoralizing to 
all youth. In the marvelous advance and by some legerdemain, 
men get to be generals who have never been captains, and over- 
seers who have never been workmen. That affronts the sense of 
the country. We believe in the natural order of progress. While 
we hold that any one may aspire to any place, we hold also that he 
must win it, not by pretence, nor by subtlety, nor by favor, but 
through the work which leads to it, and by the gradual accretion 
of the substantial qualities which are the only true basis of his 
right to it. We care very little what the work is. We say that one 
who may work and will not work is not to be taken seriously. We 
have more love for a forceful corporal than for an insipid colonel. 
We say that the only way to proficiency and the only claim upon 
respect, come through the reflex influence of much work upon the 
worker. We believe that one whose labor, either mental or manual, 
adds to the power and the assets of the v/orld, has a wealth and a 
joy of his own to which the idler, no matter how rich, has no 
claim whatsoever. 

I am aware that I am on sensitive ground and may be mis- 
understood, but I am confident that if I can make myself clear 
I shall be sustained by the substantial sentiment of the country. 
I am not urging manual as against intellectual labor, any more 
than intellectual as against manual labor. I am not saying that 
one should remain in the " class " in which he was born, for I 
know nothing of " classes " in America and I do not admit that 
any one in this country is ever born in a " class." Work makes 
the worker. The vv^illing workman, whatever his poverty or his 
work, is likely to be a better citizen and a better man than the 
willing idler, whatever his riches or his superficial accomplish- 
ments. It is not a matter of " class " at all, but of the adaptation 
of men and women in general to the work which they can do 
best. I am not treating of exceptional cases, but surely I am 
not discouraging those of exceptional gifts, for all experience 
proves that the exceptional and the great have at first been 
inured to the severe labor which v/as at hand and that that very 
fact opened the door of opportunity, pointed the way to the thing 
which they could do best, and seasoned them for the doing of it. 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY yj 

It is a matter of efficiency, and therefore of happiness and growth, 
in occupation. What I am urging is that the schools must keep 
abreast, now and in time to come as they have been doing in 
time past, with the natural outworking of our democracy; that 
they shall not be exclusive in any sense, but must be no less con- 
cerned about industrial than about intellectual education. It is 
because I believe as ardently as I do in the open chance for every 
American child, that I say that the implications and the influences 
of the schools m^ust not lead boys who might become excellent 
cabinetmakers into being no-account lawyers, and girls who might 
be first-class breadmakers or dressmakers into being fourth-class 
music teachers. The best chance of every one is through the 
thing that he can do best, and while the schools are to inspire 
and encourage him, they may well be on their guard lest in mis- 
guided enthusiasm of their own they turn him from the course 
which is likely to be the best for him. 

All education must be provided in American schools, but con- 
clusions about life occupations are not to be forced — not even by 
implications. Determinations are to be left to natural inclinations 
and to the fates which are kindly to those who have real in- 
clination to actual work of any kind. 

All this leads us to see that the school system lias grown de- 
formed : it is one-sided and not broad enough at the base. The 
trouble is not that the higher institutions have grown abnormally. 
They are doing what colleges and universities ought to do. They 
are not doing what they ought not to do. Free universities have 
become tlie finest expression of the souls of great states, and they 
are beginning to be the best expression of the souls of great cities, 
in all parts of the country. Nor is the difficulty in the secondary 
schools, although they are afifected by it. The ailment is in the 
elementary schools. 

Waste in the Elementary Schools 

Our elementary schools train for no industrial employments. 
They lead to nothing but the secondary school, which in turn 
leads to the college, the university, and the professional school, and 
so very exclusively to professional and managing occupations. One 
who goes out of the school system before the end or at the end of 
the elementary course is not only unprepared for any vocation 
which will be open to him, but too commonly he is Vv^ithout that in- 
tellectual training which should make him eager for opportunity and 



78 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

incite him to the utmost effort to do just as well as he can what- 
ever may open to him. He goes without respect for the manual 
industries, where he might find work if he could do it. He is with- 
out the simple preparation necessary to definite work in an office 
or a store. He is neither clear about his English, nor certain about 
his figures. Parents often take their children from the elementary 
school before the end of the course, not only because they can not 
comprehend much that is being done, but because they feel that 
their children will not have more earning capacity for the work 
which they must expect to do if they stay than if they go. 

The programs in the elementary schools are overloaded, and the 
teachers are overtaxed. The terms have become too short and the 
vacations too long, in the interest of teachers who are often over- 
worked by schools that are too large and by programs that are too 
crowded and complex. But that is not the worst. There is too 
much pedagogy and too little teaching. There is too much arti- 
ficial, and superficial, and therefore false, culture, and too little of 
the only thing that makes true culture. There are too many classes, 
too many books, too many visionary appliances. The teachers are 
forced into fanciful speculation and airy methods in order to be 
thought at the fore of pedagogical progress. There are pedagogical 
and psychological wretches who seem to think that they can. ex- 
periment upon children as physiologists and bacteriologists practise 
upon guinea pigs, and that without any equivalent basis of scien- 
tific knowledge. The result upon the child is confused conceit 
rather than mental clarity, and a little information about every- 
thing rather than exact efficiency in any definite thing. 
There is lack of concentration and drill upon any one thing until 
it is mastered, and therefore there is little exultation over accom- 
plishment, small inspiration to new undertakings, and a dearth of 
either information or power that is permanently retained. It 
wearies the teacher and mystifies the child ; it confounds the father 
and mother and deprives the school of the intelligent cooperation 
of the home. 

Even that is not all. We are more prodigal of the lives of chil- 
dren than is any other constitutional nation upon the globe. We 
let them commence school late and come irregularly and loiter along 
through a confused course at their pleasure or discomfiture, as you 
please. Between subordinating our elementary schools to the re- 
quirements for admission to a literary high school, and the indif- 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 79 

ference of legislators and petty magistrates about making and en- 
forcing attendance laws, we are doing a great wrong to millions of 
children, we show a larger percentage of illiteracy than other 
favored nations, and we withhold the support which the schools are 
bound to give to the strength and character of the Republic. 

Everybody sees the results but not many appreciate the reason. 
The root of the trouble is not where the uninitiated are looking for 
it. It is not, for example, with what the editorial writers call the 
•" fads and frills." Drawing, basketry, modeling, sloyd, joinery, 
cooking, and sewing, for an hour or two each week, impose no 
burden. They afford relaxation, open the way for healthful com- 
radeship and rivalry, supply motive, and lay a little of the ground- 
work for happy lives, by looking toward both the manual and 
mental efficiency so sorely needed. But we do not lay the first 
courses in the building with sufficient exactness and strength to 
enable our young men and women to erect either successful pro- 
fessional or successful industrial lives upon them. Good house- 
wifery and good craftsmanship are not forging ahead. The bake- 
shop is a menace to stomachs and to homes. The woman who 
can not bake a light loaf of bread, or broil a steak and keep the 
juices in it, or happily employ her odd moments with a needle, may 
be a very charming institution ; she may keep us posted about the 
new novels and the opera ; she may amply make up for shortcom- 
ings by teaching school ; but, she is an inefficient home maker, and 
it is not given to many to make up for that. The lack of house- 
keepers is as serious as the dearth of mechanics, and whatever the 
schools have done to correct the trouble, in either case, has been 
but little and it has not been a waste of time. The only legitimate 
criticism upon it is that there has not been enough of it, nor enough 
definiteness about it, to make sure of results. If more of the time 
of the schools were given to these things, with a stern eye to effi- 
ciency; and if there were less waste of time in connection with 
books, we would soon see a new and a more golden epoch in 
American education and in American life. 

The things that are weighing down the schools are the multi- 
plicity of studies which are only informatory, the prolongation of 
branches so as to require many textbooks, and the prolixity of 
treatment and illustration which will accommodate psychological 
theory and sustain pedagogical methods which have some basis of 
reason but which have been most ingeniously overdone. 

I have no right to say this without more definiteness, even though 
it tax your patience. There is a waste of time and productivity 



80 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

in all of the grades of the elementary schools. If a school is to be 
graded, then a grade should mean something. A child is worse 
oil in a graded school than in an ungraded one, if the work of a 
grade is not capable of some specific valuation, and if each added 
grade does not provide some added power. The first two grades 
run much to entertainment and amusement. The third and fourth 
grades repeat the work supposed to have been done in the first 
tYW. Too many unimportant and unrelated facts are taught. It 
is like the v/earying orator who reels off stories only to amuse, 
seem.s incapable of choosing an incident to enforce a point, and 
makes no progress toward a logical conclusion. The early grades 
constitute the period of imitation, and the work should be miainly 
drill based on memory and imitation. It is not the period of 
much thinking; it requires such drill as will result in exact 
knowledge of the rudiments when the time for using them really 
comes. Thought should not be much expected in these grades. 
The reading should be for the quick recognition of the word and 
the proper expression of it, rather than to germinate thought. When 
thinking is possible arid normal, the time to encourage it has 
arrived. Then it is done too slowly. The work of the first four 
grades is too much extended, and that of the last four is not com- 
menced early enough. 

Let us illustrate: The backbone of our elementary work should 
be the English language — not language lessons learned and recited, 
but a progressive knowledge of grammatical analysis, much readir.g 
for the pleasure there is in it, and a use of the language in accurate 
and forceful statement. If this is really the point, it will be seen 
how much of what we are now ^'oing may be omitted. There is 
much in our elementary mathematics that is of little value as 
m.ental discipline and of little use in life. In the lower grades the 
pupils should be made " letter perfect " in the tables and the funda- 
mental processes. This perfect knowledge will, a little later, master 
fractions, decimals, and percentage, which are the same things in 
different forms. The rest in the books is of little value except in 
particular employments which few of the pupils will ever enter. 
There is too much geography in present courses, and much is gone 
over again and again. Only the relations of the great natural and 
political divisions of land and water, the location of the great centers 
of population, with more of the details of one's own state, need 
find an early place in the schools. The rest is unremunerative to 
small children, and they will get it in a few minutes by and by, if 
it ever becomes necessary for them to know it. In physiology 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 8l 

we are trying much which only a physician can understand, and 
which there is no present call for the child to know, and we are 
doing it badly and using the time wastefully. We reach after 
too much mere information in the lower grades, and in the later 
ones we are not up with the normal powers of the healthy child. 
And the full and proper exercise of the intellectual as of the 
physical powers is the essential condition of mental health. 

The larger part of this w^aste, as it seems to me, is due to two 
very plausible and very baneful doctrines which pretty nearly have 
taken possession of the schools in the last quarter-century. Their 
disciples have been sincere enough and I have nothing in the world 
against them except a radical difference of opinion. Sometimes 
their theories have been presented attractively enough to carry asso- 
ciations of teachers into pedagogical ecstatics and hysteria. Those 
theories have had enough learning and truth to make them danger- 
ous, and not enough to make them potential. I refer to the unsub- 
stantial and delusive theories about speculative psychology, and the 
cure for all educational ailments which is falsely called " culture." 

I am far from saying that psychology, or deduction, or imagi- 
nation, or sentiment, has no place in a system of education. 
Each has a large place Vvdiere sense is free to ridicule its excesses 
and science may impose limitations upon its license. I am far 
from being indiflferent to the forms and accomplishments of polite 
society : but mere manners may be only boorishness and brutality 
refined, or insipidity but little disguised. Culture worth seeking, 
in or out of the schools, must come from labor upon things 
worth doing, and from the influence of the power to do and the 
pleasure of real accomplishment upon the soul of the one who does. 
The external forms of culture do not make real men and women, 
but enough work, and true teachers, and a healthful and attractive 
environment are more than likely to start boys and girls on the 
road to culture worth the having. 

There are people who worship theory as though it were greater 
tlian life, and culture as though it were something to be put on like 
a jacket instead of the refining of the soul through the labor and 
the experiences of life. Emotion, and ecstasy, and affectation, are 
made to do duty for sincerity and power, and for religion and patri- 
otism too. These people ignore the culturing value of labor, and 
of deprivation, and of sorrow. They are flippant about the Bible 
without feeling its inspirations or studying its translations. They 
are not much stirred by the flag, for they know little of the heroism 
that has reddened so many stripes, and they feel little of the aspi- 



82 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

ration that is emblazoned in every star. Mind you, it is not said 
that these people are the rich. Quite as often they are people who 
make "culture" do duty for riches. Frequently they are people 
who have gained wealth faster than they can assimilate it. Who- 
ever they are, they should no longer be permitted to tear out the 
substantial underpinnings of the schools. 

These things are said only in explanation of the difficulties and 
in hope of finding a remedy for the troubles of the elementary 
schools. Whatever the explanation, the difficulty is manifest and the 
need of remedy is imperative. We must know what children of 
school age there are in a state, and where they are when the schools 
are open. We must stand for simplifying the course and shorten- 
ing the time of the elementary schools, and for making their teach- 
ing of more definite worth. We must try very hard to have the 
child able to do some definite thing, no matter at what age we 
lose him. 

We must organize an entirely new system of general industrial 
and trades schools which will make it worth while for all children 
to remain in school ; and which will provide for the children of the 
masses, and for the great manufacturing and constructive indus- 
tries, something of an equivalent for what we are doing for the 
children of the more well-to-do and for the professional interests 
and the managing activities of the country. 

Factory and Trades Schools 

It is time to organize a wholly new order of schools as a part 
of the public school system. We may separate the new order into 
two general classes. One class may train all-round mechanics for 
work in factories, where workmen act in cooperation, where each 
is part of an organization, and where much machinery is used ; and 
these may be called factory schools. The other class may train 
mechanics who work independently, mainly with their own tools, 
and without much machinery; and these may be called trades 
schools. 

We say " a new order of schools " because the new schools ought 
to be sharply distinguished from any schools that are now known 
in America. They ought to be wholly apart from the manual 
training schools. They will have a distinct individuality and a 
definite object of their own. They are neither, primarily, to quicken 
mentality nor to develop culture: those things will come in the 
regular order. The " culturists " are not to appropriate these new 
schools. They are not to train mechanical or electrical engineers; 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 83 

the literary and technical schools are doing that very amply. They 
are not even to develop foremen ; leaders will develop themselves 
for they will forge ahead of their fellows by reason of their own 
ability, assiduity, and force. The new schools are to contain noth- 
ing which naturally leads away from the shop. They are to train 
zcorkmcn to do better zvork that they may earn more bread and but- 
ter. 

A tentative plan would make these new schools more shoppish 
than schoolish; put them in plain but large buildings, sometimes 
using idle factories of which many cities have a supply; use books 
somewhat, but make reading subordinate to manual work; refuse 
to permit our charming friends, who write and print and sell 
books, to inflate these schools, as they have the elementary schools, 
to the bursting point; put them in charge of craftsmen who can 
teach, rather than of teachers who are primitive mechanics; keep 
them open day and evening ; make the instruction largely individual ; 
adjust them to the needs of those who must work a part of the time 
at least in order to earn a living ; and make them for boys and guds 
and men and women, and of every kind and description which 
may be necessary to meet the demands of the local factories and 
trades. 

These schools will have to be an integral part of the public school 
system, for the double reason that they can not be successful with- 
out articulating with that system and that they will not be accepted 
either by capital or organized labor without standing upon a legal 
footing which is independent of both and fair between them. It 
may as well be said at once that any school teaching a definite trade 
will fail without the sympathy of both the capital and the organized 
workmen engaged in that trade. They can not be expected to sup- 
port it, if it can be used in favor of another interest and so ar- 
rayed against their own. Capital will take care of itself under 
economic laws that are well understood. If it can not venture with 
reasonable expectation of profit, it will retreat; but it will exist. 
Capital has a strong enough motive for activity in the hope of 
profits, but labor has a stronger one in the need of bread. In this 
country it is not in the nature of either to brook injustice, and the 
needs of each make it unnecessary that the other do so. In the 
last analysis each will have to square with the plan that stands 
fair, that encourages capital to provide labor for workmen by pro- 
tecting all of the just rights of capital, and that encourages the man 
to make the most of himself by assuring all of his just rights m 
his individual industry and skill. 



84 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

That is an American plan and it ought to prevail. It is the only- 
one which holds out the equal chance to every one. Such a plan 
can not in the nature of things be left to private enterprise. It can 
not be dominated by any forces which are in the least exclusive. 
American workmen are not willing to depend upon philanthropy. 
They will not widely accept the training schools set up by the 
manufacturing corporations. They are entitled to the same, or 
equivalent, rights as those which are already granted to the pro- 
fessional and employing classes. They know that, and will exact 
what belongs to them. Whatever is done they want done so com.- 
pletely as to command the respect of the best skill. They will tol- 
erate no false pretense about mechanical skill, but they will be glad 
to shorten the time in which their boys may become real journey- 
men. In any event, they know very well, at least their leaders do, 
that when these things are so they will have to accept them. All 
this can come in no other way than upon the basis of, and in 
association with, the public schools. 

The new schools can not displace, nor half displace, the common, 
elementary school. They will have to follow and' supplement it. 
The reason is both in educational necessity and in the likes and 
the needs of the people. But it is quite possible that the compul- 
sory attendance age, in cities at least, may be so extended as to 
cover the time of these industrial schools. Easily so if the element- 
ary course can be shortened or children can be brought to the end 
of it earlier than they are. The law should see that a child is 
either in school or at work up to his seventeenth or eighteenth 
year. 

How far we can succeed in establishing these purely industrial 
schools is, of course, problematic. Cities and towns will have to 
be encouraged by liberal State support. No trades schools have 
ever been successful without government aid. The experiences of 
other lands — and there have been rich experiences in other lands — 
will have to become well known among our people. In any event, 
it is certain that the extent to which the movement takes hold upon 
our life seems to be filled with a significance to which no intelligent - 
American can remain indifferent. 

Re-forming the Public School System 

It remains for me to suggest, as briefly as I may, the location and 
relations of these new schools in and to the public school system, 
and the extent of the re-form.ing which will be incident to their 
admission. 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 85 

It is proposed to reduce the compulsory attendance age to seven 
years in cities and towns, and to take definite measures for a far 
more complete and regular attendance; to lengthen the term and 
lighten the work; to simplify the courses and to give them a more 
industrial and efficient trend through the simple forms of hand 
work, such as paper cutting and folding, molding in sand and clay, 
plain knife and needle work, and the like, which can be done in the 
regular schoolrooms from the very beginning of the primary 
grades; and to push children along so that they will at all times 
have work which appeals to their years, and will complete the 
present work up to the end of the sixth grade at an earlier age than 
now. If the present eight grades can be shortened by one or two 
grades and a year or two of time, so much the better. 

At the end of the present sixth grade it is proposed to have the 
system begin to separate into three very distinct branches. The 
larger part of the work of the present seventh and eighth grades 
would be uniform, but some differentiation, looking to very com- 
plete separation, would begin with the present seventh grade. 

The three distinct classes of schools to follow the elementary 
schools would be ; Urst, the present high school system, which would 
be somewhat relieved because of the new arrangement; second, 
business schools looking to work in offices, stores, etc.; and third, 
factory and trades schools looking to the training of workmen. 

With the work of the present seventh grade there might be com- 
menced some study of modern foreign languages by pupils destined 
for the literary and classical high schools ; some special commercial 
subjects by pupils destined for the advanced business schools ; and 
some special training at benches with tools, and in the household and 
dom>estic arts, for those who are to stop with the elementary schools 
or are to go to the factory schools or trades schools. 

At least half of the teachers in the seventh and eighth grades 
should be men ; and these grades may well be housed in central 
and specially prepared rooms. 

We might hope to economize the time and increase the efficiency 
and productivity through the gram.mar grades to such an extent that 
a part of the compulsory school life of the child would remain at 
the end of the eighth grade; and we might also hope that there 
would be schools beyond the eighth grade which would be able to 
50 increase the earning power of the child, no matter what his life 
work should be, that it would be clearly to his interest to remain 
in school. Then, as he approaches what is now the seventh grade, 
he and his teachers and parents would begin to think of the work 



86 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT ' 

he is ultimately to do, and by the time he is through the elementary 
course he would find abundant opportunity and have some enthu- 
siasm for a school which may exactly qualify him for that work, 
no matter whether it is professional, or in business activities, or in 
purely industrial lines. 

Conclusion 

We can discuss the subject no longer tonight. The sure basis of 
a nation's strength is in industry as much as in intellect, and in 
skill as much as in resources. The assurance of a nation's great- 
ness is in the equipoise of mental and manual activities. We do 
well to open treasure-houses of higher and liberal learning, but they 
will avail little if we permit inefficient primary schools and if we 
turn away from the labor of the hand. We do well to conserve 
material resources, but it will not count for much unless we con- 
serve the time of boys and girls and enlarge the efficiency and 
versatility of the craftsmanship which must convert resources into 
merchantable goods. It is idle to pursue a course which is destruc- 
tive of the equilibrium of the common life and ignores the decisive 
influence of work upon the worker. Heads and hands and hearts, 
acting together, are larger factors than wood and iron and water in 
the economic problems of the world, and they are infinitely larger 
factors in the moral, and constitutional, and international, and eter- 
nal problems of men and women. 

We can not escape the fact that the elementary schools are wast- 
ing time, and that the lack of balance in the educational system is 
menacing the balance of the country. Children, schools, and country, 
are being ground out between fanciful and conflicting educational 
theories. The demand that there shall be less mystery and exploita- 
tion, less prolixity and parade, that the programs of the schools shall 
be more rational and that the work of the teachers shall fit children 
for definite duties with more exactness, is heard on every side. 

It does not mean that we must give over the work which goes to 
literary accomplishment, or art sense, or refined manners, or pro- 
fessional equipment, or scientific learning of whatsoever kind. It 
does mean that the equilibrium between intellectuals and indus- 
trials is being lost and must be restored. It does mean that children 
are being misdirected into misfits and that it must cease. It means 
more concern for life, increased productivity in the elementary 
schools, and incidentally, more rational courses in the secondary 
schools. 



THE ADAPTATION OF THE SCHOOLS TO INDUSTRY AND EFFICIENCY 87 

It is not for a great national association of teachers to dodge or 
to deny a palpable difficulty in the schools. The fault is no more 
inside than outside of the schools. It is the product of our political 
freedom, of our quick temperament and universal ambitions, of our 
aptness in making and acting upon propositions, of our tendency to 
do everything at once, of our bad habit of not taking care, and of 
the toleration and good nature which allow people to try out at 
the common cost any philosophy that the brightest and wildest 
imaginations in the world may bring forth. In a way it is credi- 
table to us. We would rather be all that we are than be with- 
out the open chance and without the common alertness. But it is 
for the National Education Association to recognize difficulties an 1 
meet them. We may not all see just how to do it tonight but we 
will find the way tomorrow. And no matter what we do, the 
glorious optimism of the nation will rise to greet the morning sun 
with an eye as clear and a soul as confident as ever. 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 

•ABDJRESS BEFORE THE CURRENT TOPICS CLUB OF THE Y. M. C. A. OF 
TROY, N. Y., APRIL 2, I908 

Mr Toastmaster and Gentlemen of the Current Topics Cluh: 

The opportunity to discuss with you the needs of this city con- 
cerning schools, is one which I keenly appreciate. Troy is an ener- 
getic, thrifty, business city, and I am assured that your organization 
consists very largely of men who are active in its business affairs. 
Such men are much interested in the good repute and prosperity 
of their city; their influence upon its sentiment is very consider- 
able; their views of public policies are, as a rule, very rational and 
sane. As their business is closely related to the prosperity and 
repute of the city, and as their methods must be determined by 
sound business principles, they have both the motive and the means 
for doing things, and preventing things, in ways that make for 
the common good. Troy has had many difficulties about its schools, 
and I have therefore accepted, with pleasure, your invitation to 
present my views concerning the proper organization and admin- 
istration of the schools in such a city. 

The Cause of Difficulties 

I have said that you have had very considerable difficulties in 
connection with your schools. I doubt if any of you will be dis- 
posed to deny it. I have had cause enough to know it, and I am 
sure that you know that I know it. I do not mean to say that in 
the long run you have had more difficulties than other cities : you 
have had an epidemic of difficulties in the last year or two. It is 
to the credit of your city that your people have been indignant 
about it, and have shown determination and ability to remove the 
cause. The irritating cause of the trouble may be expressed in the 
word " politics." A system of public schools is vitally dependent 
upon immunity from all partizanship, which is well enough when 
kept within its legitimate bounds. 

Common schools rest upon a basis of unalloyed patriotism. The 
intrusion of any special interest is resented by the common thought 
of the people, and is provided against by the laws as completely as 
lav/s can regulate the doings of people who are blinded by their 

[88] 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY S<) 

intensity of feeling, or who resort to mischievous and subtle meth- 
ods for gaining their particular ends. Any intrusion of the par- 
tizanship which is expressed by the word " politics," into a system 
of common schools, is an unmitigated nuisance. Politics has bur- 
rowed its way into the school system of Troy, In saying that, I 
by no means attribute the responsibility to the managers of any 
one party. I have no doubt that there are artists on both sides of 
politics in Troy, who would use the schools to promote party ends, 
so long as it is possible for either one side or the other to do it. 
Certainly I do not mean to say that Troy is worse than many 
other cities : indeed, in some respects, I think it is better. It has 
Lad good schools in the past ; and in the force and positive- 
ness of the determination to have good schools in the future, 
which it has shown in the last year, it is to be commended above 
many other cities. It may just as well be understood, first as last, 
and here as elsewhere, that an efficient system of common schools 
must be very responsive and sensitive to a wholesome and informed 
popular sentiment which will brook no interference by special and 
selfish interests. 

The Board of Education 
The first need, the one that is fundamental to all the others, is a 
board of education consisting of sane and balanced members. The 
board stands for the people. It is not expected that it will consist 
of teachers or of others who are familiar with the history and philos- 
ophy of education, or who have had much intimate experience with 
the internal operations of the schools. It is not only unnecessary 
that the members of the board shall be experts in the administration 
of the schools, but, generally speaking, it is undesirable. It is neces- 
sary that they shall be honorable and intelligent citizens, who are 
able to understand and to express the better sentiment of the people 
concerning the schools. Public sentinient must have its opportunity. 
There is an all-important factor in school administration which is 
wholly apart from making courses of study and methods of teach- 
ing. The people are to be free to say what, in a general way, their 
schools shall do. They are to retain the power to locate and de- 
termine the character of buildings, to map out the roads that are 
to be pursued, and to control the quality of the instruction. The 
laws prescribe certain minimum requirements, and fix a few im- 
perative regulations. Usage has gone further than law in settling 
the general procedure of the scliools. Aside from assuring 



90 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

reasonably efficient elementary schools in every community, both 
law and usage leave it to that community to do about what it will 
in its schools. This the community does through the common sen- 
timent and through the board of education. If the board of educa- 
tion consists of men — or men and women — who are imbued with 
the American spirit and are bent upon giving the best chance to 
every child; who can keep in touch with the people while they 
inspire, draw out, and make the most of the better purposes that 
are to be found in all American cities ; who will not believe that they 
knew so very much more nor so very much less than other people 
do about what is good for the schools ; and who, moreover, will lay 
hold of all available information, and have the courage to stand for 
what is right and what is good in the training of the young, there 
will not be very much trouble about the schools. 

It would be idle to discuss here how a city is to get such a board. 
There is a rather common saying among men who are prominent 
in the educational work of the country, that whatever method of 
appointment is employed only proves that some other method 
would be better. Doubtless the method which obtains in Troy, 
namely, appointment by the mayor, is as good as any. Wherever 
public opinion is keen, sensitive and alert, a community will not 
long suffer itself to be misrepresented by a board of education 
which makes plunder out of securing supplies for the schools, and 
patronage out of the appointment of teachers. In such a com- 
munity, where such a board of education has in some inscrutable 
way come into being, the people will find some plan for " cleaning 
house," and putting representatives of ordinary integrity and 
ordinary intelligence in control. 

Experience has abundantly proved that a small board of educa- 
tion, with concentrated and centralized responsibility, works more 
satisfactorily than a large one in which it is difficult to locate 
meannesses. Experience has also amply demonstrated that a board 
in which all the members stand for the school interests of the 
entire city, and not for those of a ward or other subdivision of the 
city, is far more likely to deal justly with all sections, and to 
promote all the interests of all the people, than a board in which 
the members represent subdivisions of territory and population, 
and scheme to secure a special advantage to the special interests 
for which they stand. 

^ In general, it may be said that a board which is small enough to 
sit around a council table and confer in moderate tones, is very 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 9I 

preferable to a board in which there is much display of oratory and 
much worthless but inevitable talk to the galleries. The city having 
a board that is small enough for real conference, modest enough to 
learn, honest enough to treat patrons and teachers with justice, and 
courageous enough to compel all selfish interests to keep their hands 
off the schools, is to be congratulated; and the city which is with- 
out such a board will do well to agitate and contend until it secures 
one. 

Business Management 

The board of education must, of course, be reUed upon to man- 
age the financial affairs of a city school system in ways which will 
command public confidence. This is essentially a business matter, 
and it ought not to be a difificult task for any man who is entitled 
to be considered for appointment to such a board. The ideal man 
for a board of education is one of sound business habits and con- 
siderable business experience, who is genuinely sympathetic with 
the popular interests and the work of the schools. Certainly with 
such men, there is very little difficulty about managing the business 
affairs of the school system. The books are to be always open, and 
whatever is done is to be without any element of secrecy about it. 
It may as well be said here as elsewhere that it is a vicious practice 
f^r the members of a board to divide matters between themselves so 
that one member shall have it in his power to determine what is to 
be done, when the law contemplates that all such determinations 
shall be reached in conference and by the board itself. Of course, 
it is well enough, and often necessary, for one member to see that 
a thing which has been determined upon, or a course which has been 
outlined, is actually carried out; but the discretion of one member 
of a board about what had better be done is never to be substi- 
tuted for the discretion of the entire board, or of a clear major- 
ity of it. 

A board of education is frequently called upon to determine 
the location of new school buildings. In rapidly growing 
cities this calls for the exercise of considerable foresight, which, 
it is needless to say, is not a very plentiful article. Yet, if the 
matter is discussed somewhat in the newspapers and among the 
people, and if there is a purpose to meet real needs, and not to 
favor a particular section or a man of influence, there will not be a 
great deal of difficulty about it. The architecture of new school 
buildings ought to have more care than is usually given it. It is a 



92 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

great pity that the opportunity to erect a really artistic and attractive 
building- is so frequently lost by reason of the disposition to favor 
local architects, who can not design an artistic structure and who 
have had little or no experience in making plans for school buildings. 
It is idle to suppose that an inexpensive schoolhouse must be an 
ugly looking one. Architectural effects are not dependent alone 
upon the size of the structure, and materials to be used, nor the 
amount of ornamentation. Any building in which the public has 
the sense of proprietorship — whether it is by the roadside or in 
a country village ; whether it is a ward school in a city of a hun- 
dred thousand people ; or whether it is the De Witt Clinton or the 
Erasmus Hall High School, costing millions, in the city of New 
York — ought to be erected upon plans which appeal to the pride 
of the people, and, consciously or unconsciously, promote: the art 
taste of the multitude. 

I am not standing for extravagance in schoolhouses or in their 
equipment. They should express something of the wealth, and a 
great deal of the intelligence, of the people whom they .are to 
serve. While it is no economy to go without good school accommo- 
dations, and while it is a positive wrong to send children to school 
in a building that is unclean or bady lighted and ventilated, there 
is no strong reason why the schools should be maintained in pal- 
aces. Of course, if a city has wealth to spend upon palaces, it may 
as well put it into palaces for the schools, as for any other purpose. 
While the efficiency of the school is not dependent upon the cost of 
the building, a public schoolhouse ought to stand in about the same 
relation to a community that a residence bears to a good citizen. 
Boards of education sometimes overreach in the matter of school 
expenditures, and quite as often they do not go as far as the better 
sentiment of the city would sustain them in going. Timidity is a 
poor attribute for a board of education, but sound judgment, cour- 
age, and frankness, which produce buildings to be proud of, and 
give character, culture, and energy to the work of the schools, will 
find abundant support in American cities. 

This is perhaps a good time and place to say that it ought to be 
realized more commonly than it is, that the school system of a city 
is a part of a state system of education, and is not responsible to 
the city government. Boards of education, in particular, oug-ht to 
appreciate that important legal fact. It is true, that it is often 
provided by law that the members of a board of education shall be 
appointed by the mayor of the city. That is for convenience: it 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 93 

does not make the board of education responsible to the mayor. It 
is true, that the law frequently provides that the school budget 
shall be passed upon by a city board, which determines the amount 
to be raised for each public purpose within the city ; but this again 
is for convenience. Perhaps the advantage of collecting all taxes 
through the same machinery, and the desirability of avoiding con- 
flicts over the sums to be raised for school and other purposes, are 
sufficient justification for this arrangement; but there is nothing in 
or about it which may legitimately give any officer of the city 
government either the legal or the moral right to interfere with 
the appointment of teachers, to fix the salaries for individual posi- 
tions in the schools, or to do anything else w^hich has a bearing 
upon their organization or administration. All that is, by the law 
of the state, committed to the state school authorities, and to the 
local board of education. 

The Superintendent of Instruction 
I have no doubt that the appointment of the superintendent of 
instruction, or superintendent of schools as he is commonly called, 
is the most far-reaching duty which the board of education ever 
has to perform. The functions of the office call for a man who 
is entitled to the community's confidence and respect. He is bound 
to be a manly man, whom the teachers, and, particularly, the chil- 
dren in the schools, may justly admire. He ought to be a man 
whose very carriage, and whose doings and sayings, will stir 
the teaching body to its very best, and will be an inspiration to 
the children in long after years. An efifeminate man may do many 
things well enough, but he can not fill the position of superintendent 
of schools. The superintendent is bound to be a scholar who hns 
not stopped studying. He must be familiar with educational history 
and theory, and yet he must not let these things have a complete 
monopoly of his thought and his work, because he must enter into 
all of the real interests, and many of the activities, of the city, to 
the end that he may best enable the schools to serve the purposes 
for which they are maintained. He must be filled with the kind- 
hness which will be sensitive to the right of every parent to the 
best possible training for his children, and jealous of the utmost 
opportunity for every child. He must have a sense of justice 
wliich will require him to hear all sides ; a measure of patience 
which is not easily exhausted; a power of reasoning which will 



94 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

enable him to come rather quickly to conclusions that will stand, 
and a decisiveness which will command confidence because of its 
logical basis and its definite and positive attitudes. He must be a 
man who can lead, and organize, and administer. He must be able 
to see what will work, and, quite as much, he must be able to see 
what will not work. There must be order, and system, and result, 
about his doings. He must see the defects in the schools, and when 
he does, he need not be afraid to speak of them; but he must have 
remedies for defects, and definite ways for resisting and curing 
the evils which incessantly creep in at all of the open doors of 
every large system or organization. Possibly above all else, he 
must be a man who can work harmoniously with other people, 
seemg their point of view and gi/ing the fullest opportunity for 
the expression of their opinions, up to the time when policies and 
courses are decided upon, and then commanding the good will and 
the support of all in the onset which accomplishes things. 

The men who are qualified for this position are scarce. This is 
particularly true when the position is in a city of 50,000 inhabitants 
or more. Still, there are such men and they may be found. Cer- 
tainly they may be found by a board of education which will treat 
them as they are entitled to be treated, and pay them as they are 
entitled to be compensated. A truly efficient city superintendent 
of schools is an economical investment, no matter how much his 
salary; and a weak one is costly, no matter how low his salary 
may be. 

It makes little difference whether, at the time of his appointment, 
he lives in the city, or in some other city in the state, or even in 
some other state. Of course, if there is a really qualified super- 
mtendent developed in a city school system, there is a large element 
of justice in giving him the place, not only because he has earned 
It, but because of the inspiration which his appointment must give 
to the ambitious and aggressive teachers who have worked long in 
the system. There is a certain advantage, too, in the appointment 
of one who is already familiar with the city — its ideas and disposi- 
tion—as there is also an advantage in a new man not being called 
upon to learn the special laws and discover the prevalent feelings of 
a state which is new to him. But these things should not have too 
much weight: a resourceful and efficient man can adapt himself 
to new conditions. I am sorry to say that it often happens that a 
city which thinks it has an excellent school system, has in fact a 
very poor one. Sometimes superintendents and teachers who have 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 95 

practically gone to seed, have told the people so often and so vehe- 
mently that they have the best schools in the country, that they 
have really come to believe it ; when what they need, above all else, 
is a new superintendent who knows what really good school work is. 
The opportunity to appoint a superintendent of schools does not 
come every day, and when it does come the board of education 
ought to look the broad field over, and, finding the man who is 
adapted to the position, pay him whatever is necessary to command 
his services. 

Of course, it must be borne in mind that a man who is really 
capable of serving a community as superintendent of its schools, 
will not tolerate ill treatment by the board of education. He is 
likely to be obliged to tolerate a great deal from other people, but 
the essentials of his office are such that he can hardly hope to suc- 
ceed in his work without the support of the board of education. 
Moreover, he must be given freedom in the discharge of his duties. 
He is an expert in organizing schools, in laying out courses of 
study, in judging of teaching, and in adapting teachers to par- 
ticular places. This is an expert and professional service, which 
nobody expects the members of the board to render. If they are 
to assume that they know more about the particular things for 
which a superintendent is employed, than the superintendent him- 
self does, they might as well dispense with the services of a super- 
intendent and manage the whole thing themselves. Modern schools 
are vitally dependent upon the expertness of the supervision, and 
this, in turn, is dependent upon a real expert who has freedom of 
action. No real expert will permit himself to be defeated and 
humiliated about matters which are within his professional knowl- 
edge and experience, and which are committed to his care, by men 
who have the mere physical or political power, and not the special 
knowledge nor the moral right, to do so. The weakest sort of a 
modern school system that I know of, is one in which a weak super- 
intendent becomes a mere figurehead, while laymen appoint favorites 
to teach the schools, and join with the superintendent in frequently 
assuring the people that they are blessed with the best school system 
in the world. 

Of course, I know that there are men who claim to be super- 
intendents of schools, without any reason. Certainly I am aware 
that there are men who have in some way got into the position of 
superintendent, who can not safely be trusted with the free exer- 
cise of a superintendent's normal powers and functions. Wherever 



96 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

this is true there is but one thing to do, and that is, to have 
a change. I know many cases where a superintendent who 
never had much real ag-gressiveness, or who has outlived such as 
he may have had, has been in one place so long that the children 
who once looked up to him from their desks with the feeling that 
he was very great, have grown to manhood and womanhood, and 
give him their best support because of their personal feelings 
towards him, notwithstanding the fact that what their schools most 
need now is a new superintendent. 

I sum this phase of the subject up in a few words by saying 
that it is the business of a board of education to make sure that 
it has an energetic, just, and up-to-date superintendent of 
schools, and then to support him in all that relates to the teachers 
and the teaching. Of course, the best results will not be secured , 
unless the board and the superintendent are glad to confer, and 
enjoy working together. No man is so great as to be above being 
called upon for the reasons which sustain what he proposes and 
what he does. That is what decent men expect, and what strong 
men enjoy. But, in the last analysis, what the superintendent of 
instruction proposes concerning the teachers and the teaching must 
be upheld in all essential particulars, or the time has come for a 
radical change in the composition of the board of education, or 
for bringing in a new superintendent whose propositions and ways 
will command confidence and support. 

The Teaching Service 

The one prime object in a large school system, the object to 
which everything else must bend and with which nothing must be 
allowed to interfere, is the development of a teaching service of 
reasonably uniform excellence. The point is not to get a few good 
teachers, but to avoid having any poor teachers. We are bound 
to preserve all of the rights of parents, and to promote all of the 
interests of children. The forces that are against us are many, 
and they are strong; but there is no way of developing a corps of 
teachers w^hich will meet all of the demands, save by uniform, 
procedure persistently followed for a long time. 

Teachers must, of course, be proficient in subject-matter. They 
must know a great deal more than the mere work which they are 
to teach. Primary teachers should have had, at least, the advan- 
tage of a high school training: it is not unreasonable to expect that 
some of them shall have had the advantage of college courses. 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 97 

High school teachers should be college graduates. I can conceive 
of circumstances which would justify the appointment of a primary 
teacher who had not graduated from the high school, and of a 
high school teacher who had not graduated from college, but in 
an overwhelming number of cases it would not be so. There is no 
excuse now for a narrow education on the part of a teacher, because 
the opportunities for liberal learning are all about us, and one who 
is likely to make a fair teacher will lay hold upon some cf these 
opportunities. 

Teachers have to be trained for their work just as any other 
professional people have to be trained for the work which they are 
to undertake. One must know the history and the philosophy of 
education; must know what other states and other countries are 
doing for and in their schools ; must know the relations which one 
class, grade, or kind of school sustains to the other branches of the 
school system ; and must have some special knowledge of ways for 
quickening the minds of children so that they will have some inter- 
est in doing the work which strengthens the mind and sharpens the 
appetite for knowing things. All this can not be trained into a 
person who is altogether without aptitude and enthusiasm for 
teaching; but one who has predisposition for it may be greatly aided 
by normal and training schools and classes. 

I have grown much in favor, of late years, of city training 
schools, because experience has shown me that they are likely to 
be more efficient than schools located outside of the city in develop- 
ing teachers suited to the special needs of a particular city. Of 
course, I have in mind cities of considerable size, where many new 
teachers are needed every year, and where a training school must 
have a considerable number of students in order to meet the annual 
demands of the city schools for teachers. This is certainly so where 
a city has a highly efficient superintendent, who knows what the 
schools need, who has distinct ideas about what ought to be done to 
meet those needs, and who is glad to have the ordinary schools and 
the training school, the teachers and those who are candidates for 
teachers, work together to accomplish definite ends. 

Even after this, the fact remains that some teachers are thor- 
oughly successful in some places, and as thoroughly unsuccessful 
in other places. Therefore, not only general knowledge and pro- 
fessional training, but adaptation to particular pupils and particular 
kinds of work, rnust be considered. Often a teacher does not know 
what she would most like to do, or what she can do best, until after 



98 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

she has tried. A failure in one place is not always conclusive evi- 
dence of general failure. The superintendent and the teacher must 
work it out together. If the superintendent can help the teacher, 
he is bound to do it. If she will not be helped, or can not be helped, 
she must be required to make way for one who can fill the place. 

All this points to the importance of a teaching spirit, a spirit that 
likes children and enjoys teaching, that is anxious to be proficient, 
that can appeal to intelligent parents, that can work harmoniously 
with other teachers, and can submit to the regime which is vital to 
the proficiency of all large organizations. 

Practically all of this must be left to the superintendent of 
schools. If a city has not a superintendent to whom it may be 
safely and wisely left, it needs a new one. If it has one to whom 
it may well be left, the board of education is derelict if it does not 
leave it to him. 

The statutes of this State protect the tenure of teachers in the 
cities of the first and second class. In time the same protection will 
doubtless be extended to cities of the third class. This is desirable, 
not only because of the rights of the teachers, but also because of 
the aid which it gives to the development and efficiency of the entire 
teaching force. These statutes have sometimes been misunderstood 
by boards of education, and sometimes by teachers. It is not their 
purpose to protect an inefficient teacher. Their purpose is to protect 
reasonably efficient teachers against malevolent influences from the 
outside, and against hasty and inconsiderate, or even malicious, 
action on the part of the board of education. A teacher's entire 
capital is often summed up in her reputation as a teacher. It may 
be easily and quickly injured. That is not to be done lightly. An 
act concerning a teacher, which would be proper at one time, might 
be improper at another time. By common usage and by manifest 
right, a teacher who enters upon a year of teaching should be allowed 
to go on to its conclusion, unless some special and strong reason 
comes in to make an immediate change necessary in the interest of 
the school. Where it does, there is no injustice to the teacher, 
because parents are entitled to have their children taught, and no 
individual or minor interest tmay be allowed to overthrow the 
conclusive right of the parent of the child. 

All these things, and perhaps many more, are to be considered 
by an honest board of education, whose main business is to develop 
in the schools under its charge a company of men and women who 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY 99 

can work peacefully and enthusiastically together in training the 
children as they need, and in quickening the intellectual activities of 
all the people. 

What is to be Done in the Schools? 

Up to this time I have been speaking, in the main, about the 
organization and administration of the schools. I have dwelt upon 
the character and qualities that must be found in the officers and 
teachers. Now, what is this all for? It certainly is not to provide 
work for people. The point of it all is to give every American 
child the utmost opportunity guaranteed to him by our political 
system. Indeed, I might properly go further, and say that it is not 
only to give to every child his best chance, but it is to make sure 
that he has the benefit of it, whether he or his parents are eager 
for it or not. 

To this end it is vital that every child in the city shall have the 
elements of an education; at least, he must be able to read under- 
standingly, to write legibly, and to use figures to the extent of 
making ordinary computations and preventing others from over- 
reaching him. This is his right, whether or not his parents are 
interested in his having it. It is a right which must be enforced 
and made good to him, not only in his own interest, but in the 
interest of the city and of the nation. This is by no means the 
sum of his personal rights, nor the measure of the public concern 
about him. He must be trained in morals and in manners, he must 
be made obedient to authority, and made to recognize the rights of 
others. Having to live in our modern complex civilization, he 
must be trained in the things which will enable him to hold his 
own in that civilization, and even to make some contributions 
to it, to the end that he may not be a load upon it, but may 
give it strength and make it a support and an inspiration 
to others now living, and still others who are to follow after. 
Things must be done to draw out the better side of his nature, to 
culture his spirit, and to open to him all of the possibilities into 
which a harmoniously developed human character may enter and 
make the most of himself. 

This is not all. Since we have gone so far in this country to urge 
our children to be ambitious, and to seek the highest places in our 
professional and political life ; since we have so commonly assumed 
that their best opportunity is in a purely intellectual development. 



ICO NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

as distinguished from mechanical or industrial proficiency ; since 
we have gone so far in encouraging them to enter the high school 
and go to college — which lead almost conclusively to professional 
careers ; and, since we have provided the instrumentalities for train- 
ing them for purely intellectual vocations, we must, as it seems to 
me, in order to be just to all, and in order to restore the industrial 
equilibrium of the country, take some decisive steps to dignify the 
manual industries, to urge more children to engage in industrial 
vocations, and to provide the instrumentalities which will enable 
them to acquire proficiency in industrial life and fit them for 
particular vocations therein. 

From this it does not necessarily follow that we have pursued 
a mistaken policy in doing what we have done to develop the liter- 
ary schools so strongly. They were much needed, and it is quite 
possible that they would never have been so strongly developed, 
if they had not been developed first. They are the natural product 
of the outlook and genius of the country, the inevitable outgrowth 
of our national temperament and the genius which has resulted 
from the mingling of races and the building of national institu- 
tions ; but we can hardly fail to see — indeed, the manifest break 
in the equilibrium between intellectual and manual vocations is 
compelling us to see — that we need a new class of schools which 
will make a special point of training our youth to manual industry, 
and of fitting them for particular trades. If we are to provide 
special training for those who are to follow intellectual pursuits, we 
are also bound to do it for those who are to follow manual pur- 
suits. We must do less than we have been doing, or we must do 
more. There is no danger of our doing less. 

Nor does all this imply any criticism whatever of the literary 
high schools, colleges, universities, and professional schools. The 
high school is in a special sense an American creation. In other 
national systems of education, there is hardly any class of schools 
to compare with it. It is the bridge which carries the children of 
the masses from the common elementary school over into the field 
where endless opportunities abound and where liberal learning- 
flourishes. It is properly classified with American common schools, 
and everywhere in this country it has now become a part of the 
common school system. Indeed, everywhere in the country, save 
in the North Atlantic States, colleges and universities have become 
a part of the common school system. There is reason enough to 
believe that this will yet be the case in the old-time Middle and 



THE SCHOOL NEEDS OF A CITY lOI 

New England States. It certainly will be so unless the colleges 
and universities already established keep so close to the ground and 
so near to the people as to make it unnecessary. However that 
may be, there can be no question about the fact that high schools, 
colleges, and universities are vital to the best efficiency of the 
elementary schools. Schools of every grade are quickened and 
inspired by the schools above, and an American city would make 
a deplorable mistake if it were to begin to think that the only 
schools which really deserve public encouragement and support, 
are those which teach the elementary branches. In one way or 
another, upon one plan or another, every intelligent community will 
do whatever k may do to make sure that it has up-to-date elemen- 
tary schools and that all of its children attend such schools — either 
public or private ; and also that the widest opportunities for general 
culture and for liberal learning are held out to all those who can 
be induced to lay hold upon them. 

Conclusion 
We have now considered, in a very general way, the essential 
factors of a school system in a city of some size. As my mind 
goes over the whole subject and I recur to what I have said, I am 
led to fear that you may think I have paid too much atten- 
tion to the technical or professional side of the large problem. It 
is true that that side is of first and vital importance. It must have 
the largest attention and the freest opportunity. It must have this 
from the board of education, which stands for the intelligence, the 
generosity, and the civic pride of the city. I am very far from 
being disposed to underestimate the importance of the popular ele- 
ment in the upbuilding of a system of schools. A superintendent 
and teachers can accomplish little without rational and generous 
public support. Teachers, without the help of the public, would 
probably make as bad a fist of it as the public would make without 
the help of teachers. A system of schools in this country is bound 
not only to give every child his chance, but it is also to be shaped 
with some reference to the local situation and the particular inter- 
ests of a community. The public, through the board of education, 
is derelict if it does not see to it that all this is done; the board 
of education is derelict if it does not freely take the initiative and 
exercise such decisive control as is necessary to keep the schools in 
line with the popular trend and up to the maximum of popular ex- 
pectations. To this end it is bound to demand whatever amount 



102 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

of money may be necessary to support the schools ; to provide build- 
ings which comport with the wealth and culture of the city ; and 
to install libraries, scientific apparatus, furnishings, and all appli- 
aiices which are needed by the teachers and which enlarge the 
self-respect and incite the ambition of the pupils and lead every 
sane citizen to feel proud of the fact that he has some sense of 
proprietorship in such splendid institutions. All this can result from 
nothing but generous and sincere cooperation between good citi- 
zens and good teachers. Where either of these factors is wanting, 
there can hardly be an efficient system of schools, and where both 
are present and are working in cooperation, there can not fail to be 
an admirable school system. 



SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF OF THE STATE 
EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

BY THE COMMISSIONER OF EDUCATION 

These notes were the basis of a talk to the Assistant Commissioners of 
Education and the Directors and Chiefs of divisions on the 23d of Septem- 
ber 1908. 

1 System 

Daily routine must be maintained. All employees must render 
seven hours of service daily. They must be ready to begin work at 
9 o'clock, and not take more than an hour for lunch. This may be 
relaxed somewhat as to officers who do not limit their service to 
seven hours but give all their time to the service, without reference 
to the clock — but the proceedings of every day must be character- 
ized by system, order and regularity. 

2 Visiting 

The visiting habit among clerks must be sharply repressed. There 
is too much of it in the corridors, as well as in workrooms. An 
efficient employee will find plenty to do. He will be happier for do- 
ing it. If there is time for idleness, there are too many employees. 
The one who keeps busy and accomplishes things should have pref- 
erence when there is opportunity for promotion. 

3 Going to the Legislature 

Employees should not frequent, in office hours, the Senate or 
Assembly. It reflects upon the Department. They are never to go 
in groups or companies. 

4 Gossip 

Caution employees about loose talk in public places, such, for 
example, as the street cars. False and vicious stories start in this 
way. Caution all about talking among themselves, or with outside 
people, about Department matters of which they are not fully 
informed. 

5 Relations of employees 

Encourage self-respect and independence among employees. Let 
each attend to his own tasks and not interfere in the business of 
others. Discourage the borrowing or loaning of money between 

[103] 



104 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

one another. Let it be known that good standing in the Department 
requires that all ordinary living expenses be promptly met. 

6 Concessions 

Concessions to employees, such as absence, should be made very 
conservatively, only for substantial reasons, and to those who are 
diligent, proficient, and right-spirited in their work. 

7 Transfers 

We lose many employees by transfer to other Departments. We 
do not object to this; indeed, we are proud of it, if it is upon the 
initiative of the other Department, and not upon that of the em- 
ployee. Any wire-pulling on the part of the employee to effect a 
transfer is censurable and will be sufficient ground for refusing it. 
But when it is asked by the other Department because of the worth 
of the employee, and when it promises to be of permanent advantage 
to the employee, it will be cheerfully acceded to, even though it be 
to the disadvantage of the Education Department. When this De- 
partment desires to transfer an employee from another Department 
to this one I will go to the head of the other Department and ask 
him about it, and when another Department wants to take one of our 
employees it is but proper that the head of that Department should 
communicate with me about the matter. 

8 Discipline 

If an employee disregards reasonable requirements, recommend 
dismissal. 

9 Relations of officers 

Assistant Commissioners are to handle the Department business 
upon the field, i. e. throughout the State. The " divisions " are to 
handle the business within the Department. An Assistant Commis- 
sioner is to call upon the Chief of a division for any service which 
he needs. He is not to give directions. If his call is not resultful 
when he thinks it should be, he is to report the matter to the Com- 
missioner of Education. The Commissioner of Education, through 
the Chief of the Administration Division, is responsible for the effi- 
ciency and the integrity of the organization in each division. On 
the other hand. Chiefs of divisions will carefully refrain from in- 
vading that discretion in the handling of business which is vested 
essentially in the Assistant Commissioners. The divisions carry out 



SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF 1 IO5 

plans that are well settled. The Assistant Commissioners exercise 
discretion upon current questions. The Chief of a division should 
be extremely careful about any act, such, for example, as the writ- 
ing of a letter, which is outside of well established routine, or which 
in any way goes beyond the specific thing which it is committed to 
him to do. 

ID Appointments 

The law gives to the heads of divisions the initiative concerning 
appointments. This is as I wish it, and I expect to observe the spirit, 
as well as the letter, of the arrangement. I am always willing to 
confer about an appointment or promotion. I do not exact confer- 
ence — it will ordinarily be found best. I shall always maintain 
entire freedom about approvals. Not only the letter, but the spirit, 
of the civil service laws must be observed. There must be no 
maneuvering. If the civil service laws produce unfortunate results 
in any particular case, bring the matter to attention, and if need 
be we will go to the Civil Service Commission about it. In general, 
those laws are efficacious, and we must not only observe, but sus- 
tain, them. Do whatever may be done to increase the efficiency of 
employees under your supervision. If they are inefficient, try to 
change things about so as to help them. If they can not be helped, 
create vacancies and try other people. 

11 Promotions 

There are constant changes going on in the Department by reason 
of advancements to fill vacancies. Give preference to the most de- 
serving. It is not always necessary to make a promotion as soon as 
a vacancy occurs ; it is often well to let employees work for it. It is 
not always necessary to pay the maximum salary ; it is often well to 
let one prove that he deserves it. There are some of you who study 
ways for increasing the salaries of employees, more than you do 
ways for increasing their usefulness and efficiency. The temptation 
to do this is recognized. Be upon your guard about it. 

12 Answering letters 

We speak often about promptness in answering letters, and yet, 
every few days a case comes to my attention where a letter has been 
neglected. Some answer should be made to a letter the day it is 
received. Certainly it should never go beyond the second day. If 
you can not give a complete answer at once, write and say as much 
as that, and indicate when you will do it. If you are away, your 



I06 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Stenographer should attend to it. If the correspondence is volu- 
minous and delay is unavoidable, have a form for use in acknowl- 
edging receipt of letters. The credit of the Department is staked 
upon promptness in correspondence. It is a vital matter and there 
will be no compromising about it. 

13 System concerning letters 

The Department is now so well organized that there should be no 
difficulty in knowing where letters belong. If a letter gets into the 
wrong hands, it should be sent to the proper officer at once. Two 
officers should not be corresponding with the same person on the 
same subject. This may be avoided if one will make sure of his 
own responsibility and attend to his own business. 

14 Money in letters 

All letters containing money are supposed to be opened by the 
mailing clerks, who are under bonds. If by accident a letter con- 
taining money is opened by you, you should indorse the amount 
upon the letter at once, and send it without delay to the Cashier. 

15 Avoid extravagance 

Our postage, and express, and printing bills are necessarily large. 
Do not multiply sendings unnecessarily, and do not advise printing 
for the sake of printing. We do not have to make a show of doing 
things. Our business will grow in spite of us. We are to let it 
grow normally, but we are to avoid inflating it abnormally; and 
certainly we are to avoid any unnecessary expense. 

16 Stenographers 

The stenographers often need more direction than they have. 
They are to be made responsible for good order in the office, and 
for the systematic handling of business. Of course, the unsystem- 
atic and disorderly habits of an Assistant Commissioner or the Di- 
rector or the Chief of a division, may make it next to impossible for 
a stenographer to do her work and his work systematically, but it is 
to be hoped that where this is the case, stenographers will be ener- 
getic and patient in training their Chiefs in habits of order and 
system. It is well not to have too many papers upon the desk at 
once. Indeed, the ideal way is to maintain perfect files, and have 
but one subject upon the table at a time. Whether the head of the 
office is orderly or not, however, the stenographer is bound to be: 



SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF I07 

that is an essential part of the stenographer's training. In the ab- 
sence of the head of the ofifice, the stenographer must do whatever 
she can to meet the wishes of the correspondents, and she must cer- 
tainly see to it that nothing lies upon the table, without attention, 
long enough to bring reproach upon the service. 

17 Form 

All Department documents and letters should be in excellent form. 
I assume, of course, that good literary style and correctness in 
orthography and punctuation never will be lacking. I mean more 
than this ; namely, that letters and papers must be in good style, in 
good physical form and marked by absolute neatness. 

18 Signatures 

Something has been said heretofore about signatures. There must 
be responsibility about the matter. When the signature of an officer 
vitalizes a paper, no one else should assume to sign it. A rubber 
stamp does not make a real signature. No one should sign any 
other name than his own without at the same time adding some- 
thing which clearly signifies that it is not an original signature. 
When the validity of a paper depends upon the signature, it should 
never be signed before the blanks are all filled and it is in all 
respects complete. 

1 9 Traveling 

Aside from those officers of the Department whose particular 
business it is to travel, there should not be a great deal of it. Even 
such officers may waste time in traveling. It very commonly 
happens that it is better to send for local school officials to come 
here, than it is to go to see them. There is a serious break in 
handling the business of the Department when officers are away. 
They should not be away unless it is certain that the service will 
gain more by their going, than by their staying. When one travels 
on our business he should live comfortably, without ostentation, 
entering all expenses in his notebook and making a bill with such 
detail and in such form that it explains and justifies itself. 

Whenever any officer of the Department is upon the roads he 
must remember that he is the representative of New York. When 
he makes an address or reads a paper, he should prepare for it 
as completely as he may, and present it just as well as is possible. 



I08 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

20 Hesitation and haste 

Do not hesitate long about deciding and acting. You are likely to 
be as well able to do the thing rightly today as tomorrow. Prob- 
lems accumulate with surprising rapidity. Do not fear mistakes; 
correct them openly as soon as discovered. Yet take the time that 
each duty requires. Do not let one duty jostle another. Do one 
thing at a time. It is remarkable how much more may be done in 
a given time if one thing is taken up at a time, attended to reso- 
lutely, and not done too hastily. It is quite as remarkable how little 
is accomplished, and how ,much demoralization results from hesita- 
tion and apprehension, or from impulsiveness and undue hurrying. 

21 Helpfulness 

Never let a visitor go away from the Department with ground for 
feeling that he has not been well treated. Advance to him and 
render him every possible service. Outside, as well as inside, of the 
Department, try to extend and uplift the educational service of the 
State, and be of every possible assistance to every one who may be 
assisted, whether he asks your help or not. 

22 Training employees 

We owe it to those who are under our direction that we direct 
and train them. They should never fail, or partially fail, for lack of 
firmness and steadiness in holding them to their responsibilities. Get 
them together and tell them what in general is wanted. Do not let 
them get into trouble because they are not told. If the fault is per- 
sonal and specific, try to correct it by personal and direct, though 
kind and genuine, words. Cultivate kindness but avoid insipidity. 
Commend when you may, but do not do and say the pleasant things 
alone, when there are unpleasant duties which the good of an in- 
dividual and the efficiency of the service require us to perform. 

23 Freedom and independence of action 

The theory of the departmental organization is that there is some 
one below the Commissioner of Education who will take care of all 
ordinary Department business which the law permits another to do. 
In doing this, act freely and independently. Do not trouble me with 
routine matters. Hold down your own job and fill your own place. 
Go ahead and reach out, if you can do it without getting in a mess. 
Spare me from annoyances as much as you can. When there is 



SUGGESTIONS TO THE STAFF IO9 

something of real import which is not amply provided for, come to 
me without hesitation. I will give every help to you in my power, 
but I have many things, and very important things, that I want to 
do, and my doing of them depends upon your successful handling of 
all the ordinary business of the Department. 

24 Conferences 

Whenever I am not occupied I am glad to see any one in the De- 
partment for a word of greeting. When one wishes to confer with 
me about a matter of business it is necessary that he make the fact 
known to my Secretary to the end that an appointment may be 
arranged. It is idle for one to come to me about matters that an- 
other is charged with the duty of attending to and can attend to 
better than I. But when it is a matter that I should attend to I 
want to attend to it, and at a convenient time, so that it may be 
completely gone over. If it is of importance it will be better if I 
am advised of the nature of it in advance so that I may get it in 
mind and be as well prepared for the conference as may be. 

25 Acknowledgments 

If any one has imagined that I have been disposed to complain, he 
is mistaken. I am trying only to enlarge the pleasure and increase 
the usefulness of men and women who, in nearly every case, are 
ideally fitted for the work they are doing. I have never known an 
organization embracing three hundred people to operate, on the 
whole, more smoothly, or to be more capable and efficient. I am 
personally under endless obligations to you and to many others in 
the Department, and I want you to know that I keenly appreciate 
my obligations, and the obligations of the State, to you. But the 
highest measure of efficiency, and therefore of pleasure, in work, 
must always come from being busy, from being interested and en- 
thusiastic, from accomplishing things, and from occasional reminders 
about the evils that menace a large organization and interfere with 
large undertakings. 

26 Opportunities 

We have a more comprehensive State educational organization 
than we ever had in this State before. There is nothing to com- 
pare with it in any other state. We have the opportunities to help 
numberless people, to raise the intellectual plane of the State, and so 
to distinguish the State in the eyes of the country. One is un- 
worthy who would not make the most of such opportunities. 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 

ADDRESS BEFORE THE JOINT MEETING OF THE ASSOCIATED ACADEMIC 
PRINCIPALS AND THE STATE TEACHERS ASSOCIATION, AT SYRACUSE, 
N. Y._, DECEMBER 29, I908 

We are trying very hard in New York to bring the work of our 
schools to the support of our industries. A year ago when I dis- 
cussed the relations of public schools to the mechanical industries, I 
observed that the reasoning would be different as to the agricultural 
industries because the situations are unlike, and that I would take 
up that theme at some future time. I turn to it now. 

Differing Situations 

The success of the farmer depends upon balanced character, love 
of the earth and of Hfe in the open, knowledge of his farm and the 
ability to make some scientific applications, practical experience, a 
grasp of market conditions, sound relations with railroads, 
aggressiveness in planning, and good business methods, more than 
upon expertness in craftsmanship. The farmer is his own capitalist. 
In New York we had 226,000 farms in 1900. They averaged almost 
exactly one hundred acres to the farm. Quite 200,000 of them were 
operated wholly or in part by the owners. There was little room 
for capital to dictate. Hardly any other man has the earning 
capacity of so much property dependent upon his personal attributes 
as the farmer. The mechanic's equipment is in his skill of hand, 
and in his not expensive tools if he works by himself, or in a plant 
owned by others if he works in a factory. In^ either case he may 
move readily. The farmer's equipment is in his farm and in his 
trained and dependable judgment. He is very much a fixtm-e 
wherever he is. 

In the mechanical industries men live and think and plan and 
work collectively. They go out much of nights ; they associate in 
organizations easily. In the agricultural industries men live and 
work very individually. They come to conclusions and carry out 
plans by themselves. In the cities, centralized capital on the one 
hand, and the leaders of labor organizations on the other, struggle 
with each other, to the frequent disadvantage of both. There much 
depends upon others. The farmer controls a considerable property, 
and the responsibility of prosperity or penury is very largely upon 

[no] 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS III 

himself. With both the fanner and the mechanic the personahty is 
of overwhehning importance, but the conditions give the indi- 
viduahty of the farmer larger opportunities and make his success 
or failure more notable. Essentially, the farmer lives at home. The 
family life is by itself. The work is at home. The family all have 
part in it. There is less mingling with fellow craftsmen and with 
the men and women of other crafts. Trades unionism is absent. 
The blacklist and the boycott are almost unknown. The farmer is 
both a capitalist and a laborer. If there are combinations to control 
the prices of labor, they will not hold together; and if there are 
combinations to control the prices of products, they are made 
by manipulators who get the advantages. It all makes so distinct 
a manner, of life that it must create instrumentalities and policies of 
its own. 

We live in an industrial democracy. We are to work out our 
political freedom and our political theories in our politics, our 
religion, our education, and our industries. People are to do what 
they can for themselves. What can be done only in combination 
and through the use of common power may be done in that way so 
long as the fundamental equality of right is preserved. With this 
simple limitation, the state must aid all of its industries. And the 
manner of its aid must be specific, and the measure of it must 
regard the significance of the industry. 

New York Agricultural Conditions 

In days when the term " agriculture " embraced everything per- 
taining to the farm ; when all there was of agriculture was " practi- 
cal " ; when we were almost wholly an agricultural people ; when there 
were no glittering and gilded cities to allure the youth, and no rail- 
roads to carry them there ; when our tillable lands were as potential 
as any which had been broken; when the farm raised all that it 
needed, gloried in its independence, and was the attractive abiding 
place of its youth ; and when a simple school in cooperation with a 
simple and yet noble civilization sufiiced to meet the essential needs 
of a virile people, New York was the first agricultural state of the 
Union. All that is much changed. You will not ask me to weary you 
with the details, available to all, which would prove an obvious fact. 
Taking our wheat, corn, oats, barley, rye, and buckwheat together, 
we have less in acreage and are producing less in quantity than 
forty years ago. The total value and the average value of lands, 
buildings, implements, machinery and live stock are less than thirty 



112 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

years ago. We have come to be the first manufacturing state in the 
Union. Our agriculture has not advanced with our manufactures. 
In the cereals other states, for sufficient reasons, have forged ahead 
of us, and it seems to me that we have not recouped where we 
might. 

The situation, in general, doubtless is that agriculturally we are 
worse off than thirty or more years ago, and a little better off than 
ten or fifteen years ago. Relatively we have lost much ground in 
many lines, and gained ground in a few. The responsibility for 
some of the losses is outside of ourselves. But, while we could not 
avoid some losses, we liave developed new situations and new 
demands out of which we might have made our losses more than 
good. We have started towards doing it, but we have not done it. 
It is not enough to give thanks that we are not worse off than we 
are. We must lay hold of the forces that will make us better off 
than we are, and perhaps better off than we ever were. Those 
forces lie in scientific knowledge and in combined action, not com- 
bined action which merely complains and tries to make other people 
pay for our losses, but combined action which will do things that 
we can not either of us do alone, and which will make it easier for 
the man who has juice and generosity and force in him to prosper 
above other men ; and which, on the whole, will enable New York 
agriculture to come to its own again. Admittedly, there are some 
conditions that are against it, but there are more new conditions 
that are in favor of it. If we can get the sentiment of the State 
in the way of reasoning that the government of New York should 
do as much for agriculture as for any other interest, or even a little 
more, and if we will lay hold of accumulated knowledge and apply 
it, and if we will organize a system of education which will support 
it, the somewhat heavy task may in time be accomplished. 

Our Natural Advantages 

There are natural advantages in our favor of which Vv^e are 
either unmindful or to which we give no fair value. Take for 
example the hills, the woods, the rocks, and the streams, the ma- 
terials for building and for roads ; the topographical, climatic, 
esthetic, healthful, and moral factors connected with them. I have 
lived for ten years in the Middle West upon a prairie where one 
can see the headlight of a locomotive for twenty-five miles. The 
soil is deep and black, without a stone in it. The people generally 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II3 

abhor hills as nature does a vacuum. If some freak of nature has 
formed a knoll, they call it a hill and try to plane it off. I have 
seen a fine row of maples half a mile long- cut down because they 
lessened the number of rows of corn, and a man of wealth thought 
he could not afford it. The roads are often impassable, and the 
cost of hard roads almost prohibitive. Farmers live in rubber boots 
for months together. The motive for moving to town is much greater 
there than here, and when a farmer lives in town there is trouble 
at both ends of his route: at one end the tenant lets the farm look 
like Hardscrabble's shanty, and at the other the farmer wants to 
keep a horse, and cow, and pig, and chickens, to the annoyance of 
his neighbors, and does what he can to avoid the cost of walks and 
pavements and sewers and electric lights. It is all natural enough, 
and only proves that the farmer is likely to be happier, and other 
people happier too, when he makes his farm an attractive and pro- 
ductive place and lives upon it. During my residence in Illinois, the 
farm lands in all the region advanced in price from about $60 to 
about $200 per acre. The regular crops of corn and oats make 
very sure returns of eight or ten per cent upon the latter valuation. 
The farmers are rational, and intense about making money, and all 
have bank accounts. But you do not have to get as much income 
out of land that you can buy for $25 per acre, as out of land that 
is worth $200 per acre, in order to make it pay; and the farm- 
houses and their conveniences and connections are no better there 
than here. In New York, above almost any other state in the Union, 
we have the hills and lowlands, the woods and streams, the diver- 
sity of soil, and the stimulation of climate, which may easily make 
rural life the finest and the noblest in all the world. If we can 
adjust the best kind of education to it all, the great leader of the 
states will have no difficulty in indefinitely maintaining her su- 
premacy. 

We have eighteen hundred miles of state roads. Put end to end 
they would reach from New York to Buffalo four times over. Over 
eight hundred miles were finished during the past year. There are 
five hundred other miles of road under contract, and still another 
thousand miles awaiting contract. We have expended less than a 
quarter of the $150,000,000 we have agreed to expend. With the 
good roads, and the telephones, and the trolleys, and the daily free 
deliveries of mails in all sections, the rural difficulties ought to 
measurably disappear. 



114 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Rural Life Gaining in Attractivsness 

Of course, there have been discouragements. It takes brawn, 
and brains, and confidence, and contentment, to till our New York 
farms. So does real success in all places and in all work. The 
weaklings have to fall down, wherever they are. The cities have 
attracted many vigorous and ambitious young men and women 
from the country. Often that has been well. One is entitled to do 
what he may love to do, if he loves to do anything. One is to be 
commended for casting his lot where he will, if he has head enough 
to think it out for himself. Such men carve out success, and many 
are heard of in the cities. ^ The failures are never celebrated and the 
volume of them is never known. The farming sections have, of 
course, suffered because of the drift to the cities. There has not 
been much return drift. The reasons for it are not hard to find. 
Those reasons are, however, beginning to disappear. The return 
drift is setting in and seems likely to be strong in the next 
generation. 

State Sentiment 

The thinking of the State has hardly been balanced in the last 
decade. We have been having more solicitude about forest lands 
than farm lands, about forest trees than shade trees or fruit trees, 
about wild animals than tame ones, and about trotting horses than 
work horses. Last fall we had serious forest fires, which stirred our 
concern and aroused our interest. We seemed to be well provided 
with men, machinery, and implements for fighting them. We have 
developed a fine sentiment about our forest preserve. We have 
created an efficient State department to look after it. We have 
even got something about it in the Constitution. It is admirable, 
and we are proud of it. We are protecting our wild animals. One 
has to pay for it, and be disgraced everlastingly, if he has a wild 
hen in his larder at any time in eleven months of the year, if it 
can be proved that the hen, when in life, zvas wild. Just now they 
are trying to mulct a man in penalties and punish him for killing 
deer that were tame and that he bred and raised in his own pad- 
dock. Last winter the Legislature made it a misdemeanor for a 
farmer's boy to shoot weasels and woodchucks beyond the narrow 
limit of his father's farm, at any time of the year, without paying 
a dollar for a license to try it. We will not worry about that: it 
will eventuate all right. But insect pests destroy more value in 
farm products every year than fires destroy in value of forest 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II 5 

products in a generation. Our Science Division conservatively esti- 
mates that the annual insect destruction to our farm products 
amounts to $24,000,000. Eastern Massachusetts has lately had to 
fight the g>'psy moth, a great destroyer of shade trees. It is said 
that in 1907 that state, in cooperation with the municipalities 
affected, expended $750,000 to fight this pest. Now it is added that 
these little scoundrels are migrating to the westward on parallel 
lines of latitude, and that the first division has even got as far as 
Springfield, and is advancing upon us with grim and sullen de- 
termination. If they get up to the New York line, we shall be 
likely to fight them with resources and energy enough to make them 
pale, because we shall be in comparison with Massachusetts and 
there will be some flavor of patriotism and rivalry about it. But 
fruit trees are as vital as forest trees ! Hens are as much entitled 
to our respectful consideration as partridges! Jersey cows have 
as many claims upon us as deer ! I recall a saying of Mr Beecher, 
that it was a great pity that people had to be born in India in order 
to hear Henry Scudder, the missionary, preach. Must we move to 
the mountains and the woods and live irregular lives in order to get 
that help for our common interests which none but the State can 
give? 

How to Increase Earnings 

There are ways by which our New York lands can earn more 
money, and the State is bound to help find them. We are not to do just 
as other states do. We have not the corn lands of Illinois and Iowa, 
nor the wheat lands of Minnesota and the Dakotas. But we have 
abundant facilities for producing things they can not grow, and we 
are close by great markets from which they are remote. It would be 
well, however, if we could see how much they are ahead of us in an 
all-important matter. That is, in the kind of education which they 
are sustaining, in the applications of the scientific knowledge which 
bears upon the productivity, and therefore upon the life and 
pleasure, of the farm. 

There are two great lines of State policy which our combined 
action ought to assure. We ought to very carefully work them out 
in our minds, have them established by law, follow them persistently, 
and bide our time. One concerns a system of education which is 
calculated to sustain modern agriculture, and the other relates to 
the things which our combined intelligence and power may carry 
directly into all of the agricultural parts of the State to help the 
people of readiest wits who are most disposed to help themselves. 



Il6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

I have much in common with the practical farmer; I join him In 
his amusement over " gentlemen farmers," but remind him that he 
ought not to begrudge them the pleasure they get out of it, nor be 
unspeakably cut up about the money they spend in the country. I 
am with him in his contempt for " scientific " farming which will 
not work, but I remind him that there is much scientific farming 
which will work, with his practical help ; and that his practical ex- 
perience will not accomplish a great deal without scientific help. 

The Rural Schools 

I am, of course, far from contending that all that agriculture 
needs is to be supplied by public schools. There are other great 
factors in the problem. With agriculture, as with every other great 
interest and its attendant life, there is as much to be reckoned with 
outside as inside of the schools. But it is not too much to say that 
agriculture above almost any other great human or commercial 
interest, now claims the support of an adequate and comprehensive 
educational system. 

Primary schools alone, no matter how good, can not supply the 
education which is required to make the most of the agricultural 
industries. The man who says high schools are unnecessary, in the 
country or anywhere else, is behind the times, and as much out of 
touch with rational educational policy as with the spirit of the coun- 
try in which he lives. Nor is it going too far to say that colleges 
are as vital as high schools to a system of instruction which will be 
equal to the demands of agricultural necessity. The first national 
industry, which supplies the larger part of the raw material for our 
manufactures and produces four times as much in value as our 
mines and oil wells together, brings good policy to the aid of neces- 
sity in claiming the support of a universal system of education. It 
is not merely that the farmers' boys and girls, like all other Ameri- 
can boys and girls, are entitled to their utmost chance : the nation's 
educational purpose has combined with situations and the importance 
of the industry to settle it. 

I have many times discussed the improvement of the rural element- 
ary schools and shall doubtless do so again, but I shall not go into 
that now beyond treating of the factors of an educational system 
which will support agricultural needs. 

It seems to me that there is not much to be said in criticism of 
the rural schools so far as general elementary instruction is con- 
cerned. It is true that there is a lack of grading and an absence of 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II7 

plan by which pupils may progress from one plane to another and 
continually look forward to higher work. But it is also true that 
the instruction is more individual, and that all of the pupils hear all 
of the instruction and all of the recitations in all subjects and in 
all grades of work. The rural schools are at least reasonably free 
from the overcrowding, the overdoing, and the overexploitation for 
all manner of ends that are so common in the cities. The teaching 
is by young women of an average competency which is now remark- 
ably high, and no one is allowed to teach without proved compe- 
tency which is reasonable. If there could be a uniform system of 
supervision by superintendents, who hold or can earn teachers' cer- 
tificates, in districts that are small enough to make actual super- 
vision possible ; if such a system of supervision could be free from 
all partizanship ; and if the supervisory districts could be arranged 
so as to have the village high schools at the centers, and relate all 
of the elementary schools to them in a way, tliere might be a univer- 
sal system of schools for teaching elementary English branches in 
the country, quite as well adapted to the general needs of the coun- 
try as those in the cities are adapted to the needs of the cities. And 
this might all very easily be. 

But while the schools of both elementary and secondary grade 
in the country are serving, or may without difficulty be made to 
serve, the needs of the country in the ordinary branches of an 
English education, they are doing nothing to train specially for the 
vocation of farming. We have apparently come to the imperative 
need of training for the industrial vocations in the cities. We have 
been training for the professional vocations for more than a gen- 
eration. There is quite as much basis of reason and right in popular 
education for the vocation of farming, as for mechanical, con- 
structive, commercial, and professional businesses. 

The agricultural situation is absolutely distinct from any other 
industrial situation, and if it is ever met efficiently it will have to 
be met in a very distinct way. It w^ill never be met by making 
agricultural schools of the country primary schools. The children 
in the elementary schools are too young to want much agriculture; 
they want English, and mathematics, and the elementary sciences 
there. The primary children in the cities stand more in need of 
agriculture, than the primary children in the country. The primary 
schools in both city and country are all-around schools. Some of 
the city children will go to the country: some of the country chil- 
dren will go to the city. The education of the country child is not 
to be narrowed down to things rural. His books are not to exclude 



Il8 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

illustrations from, and all other recognition of, rural life; but 
neither are they to exclude all else. His primary school is to be able 
to train him in the fundamentals of an all-around man, who will be 
free from all exclusiveness, and able to study and to do to the best 
advantage anything that his qualities and his tastes may dispose 
him to study and to do when the time comes. 

We could not establish exclusive agricultural schools of primary 
grade even if we were to get wrongheaded and undertake it. All 
schools require balanced work until the time for specialization 
comes. Balanced work requires elements that relate to the country 
as well as those that relate to the cities, and vice versa. There are 
higher laws and fundamental principles concerning education, and 
they bear alike upon all parts of the country and upon all manner 
of people. If we violate these laws or break these principles, the 
people soon come to realize it and trouble is, as it ought to be, let 
loose upon us. 

We bave heard much about nature study. I recognize its value. 
I intend no offense to those who have much pleasure in it. It is 
good. But it is equally good for all children, as cutting paper, and 
weaving mats, and molding clay, and the like, are good for all 
children. All of these things make for all-around culture, for all- 
around outlook, and for all-around love for work and for facility in 
doing. Nature study is quite likely to appeal less to the country 
child than to the city child for obvious reasons, and, while it is to 
be encouraged in the country as in the city, it apparently has about 
the same relation to real agriculture that sloyd has to laying out 
an electric plant for a city, or laying down the keel for a battleship. 
In other words, it is a good thing — a good thing everywhere, 
because it helps mold the character of boys and girls and keeps 
the way open for what may come after, but calling it agricultural 
instruction will not increase its importance so much as it will 
confuse some minds and subject us to the criticism that we are 
not doing what we proclaim. 

We are asked to encourage the teaching of agriculture in the 
elementary schools. I am for doing it so far as is practically 
possible. I admit, however, that I am at a loss to know what 
are the phases of real agriculture which are adaptable to the 
primary schools or how to install them in ways that will dispose 
children to become interested in them. I know of many things 
which look to quickening and dignifying the different agricultural 
industries, in which the children of farmers are likely to find in- 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS II9 

terest and which are not incompatible with the plan and purpose 
of the elementary schools, and I am for introducing them into the 
course of study ; but I confess that I am unable to see the reason- 
ableness or the practicability of teaching real agriculture, any more 
than engineering or medicine, in the elementary schools. Agri- 
culture is not an elementary subject. 

We are asked to have the normal schools train teachers of agri- 
culture for the elementary and secondary schools. Some of the 
normal school teachers know something about some of the sciences 
that are fundamental to agriculture, and some of them know some- 
thing about some of the practical methods of farming, although I 
suspect that not many of them would claim overmuch. The fact is 
that nine tenths of the students in the normal schools who will ever 
teach at all are girls. It is so, and doubtless it will continue to be 
so. Ambitious men who go beyond the high schools are going to 
the colleges. And the gods of the Greeks, mean and sordid as they 
were, would laugh at the spectacle of girl teachers training farmers' 
boys old enough to receive it, in the intricacies of real agriculture. 
Generations will come and go before there is any substantial result 
to agriculture through the girls in the normal schools. 

In the last year or two the State has made appropriations to 
establish three secondary schools of agriculture. This has been 
in response to a general sentiment in favor of agricultural educa- 
tion, made without very full consideration of the true relations 
which education must sustain to agriculture in order to be effectual, 
and without any definite general plan about agricultural education 
in New York. These schools will be of little avail to education, 
unless they are made a part of the educational system, and they will 
not be of much ultimate service to agriculture unless they are made 
to articulate with schools below and schools above them ; and it 
will be well, before we go further, to thresh out the whole subject 
and determine upon a plan which will be comprehensive enough to 
be worthy of the State and of real worth to its agriculture and all 
of its other interests. 

Wholly aside from the absence of plan about where we are going 
or where we are coming out, it is a very open question whether it 
will be well for the State to set up a few schools of a secondary 
grade in agriculture, or whether we should expect counties or town- 
ships to do it, or whether we should develop agricultural instruction 
in the existing high schools. The Education Department has been 
multiplying and enlarging agricultural subjects in the academic 
syllabus for the village high schools, and we are to be guided some- 



120 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

what by the ultimate pohcy of the State in the premises. The high 
schools, unlike the elementary schools, are upon an educational grade 
where the fundamentals of agriculture are quite practicable, and 
where the pupils are old enough to begin to have some real interest 
in the subject. Without discussing that, the interests of the State 
in general, and of agriculture in particular, clearly call for discus- 
sion and for a plan of procedure to the end that time, effort, and 
money be not wasted and substantial results indefinitely delayed. 

It has not been the American plan to segregate instruction and 
students — certainly it has not been the plan where circumstances 
have not compelled it. The strength of the universities has been 
increased by the very coordination of their colleges; the strength of 
teachers and the potentiality of teaching have been enhanced 
by association with other teachers and other teaching; and 
the efficiency of students has been promoted by contacts with other 
subjects and with other students than those within the limitations 
of their own particular subject and their own particular class. It 
has not been common anywhere in the country to establish State 
schools below the college grade except for defectives or dependents, 
unless in association with a large and comprehensive institution, 
and it is not too much to say that no school of agriculture in this 
or in any other country has become markedly successful which was 
not associated with a real university or had not become in fact, if 
not in name, a real university itself. And I am bound to look with 
some regret upon any New York policy which would put 
students of agriculture in an inclosure by themselves and deny to 
them the associations with other students which their interests im- 
peratively demand. 

There are practical as well as educational difficulties. For ex- 
ample, the courses at these schools will have to be progressive and 
extend over a term of years in order to have any respectable result; 
and unless their number is to be indefinitely extended — unless, for 
example, there shall be at least one in every county — students will 
have to be separated from home and live at these schools for terms, 
semesters, and years together. The break with the home will have 
to be practically as complete as it is with college students. And 
the break will have to come before the college age. The State will 
probably not multiply these schools to the number of forty or sixty, 
and the interests of the home, of the pupils, and of the schools, will 
hardly suffer the separation from the home before the college 
age. Then why not do the best we can for agriculture and for 
farmers' boys and girls, as for all scientific subjects and for all voca- 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 121 

tional training", in the existing local high schools, and when pupils 
are able and disposed to go away from home to school, prepare 
them for college and send them to an adequate college, and have 
the benefit of it? And, looking at the other side of it, why enter 
upon or pursue a policy which must make the public high school 
in the smaller villages merely a preparatory school for the lit- 
erary colleges ? These high schools are the people's colleges. 
82.8^ of all public high schools and academic departments in the 
State are to be found in villages of less than 5000 inhabitants, and 
71.7^ are in villages of less than 2000. It must of necessity work 
great harm to these village high schools if agricultural work is to 
be sharply separated from them. Why enter upon a course which 
will weaken them on the literary and scientific side, and with- 
hold the aid which they can give to the agricultural side 
better than any schools that are likely to be established? Why be- 
gin to exclude from them the things which are and must continue to 
be of the widest popular concern? Why not determine that the 
high schools shall be broadened so that they will meet every 
need of all of their constituents, at least up to the time when 
pupils are mature enough to go from home to go to college? 
Science and agriculture are inseparable. Scientific training and 
research, associated with practical demonstrations, are the sum 
and substance of any real agricultural advance. No one who 
has had any experience in organizing a school of agriculture, with 
lands and implements and animals for practical demonstrations, 
and who knows the difnculties and expense of organization and 
maintenance, will believe that there will be any considerable num- 
ber of such schools established and efficiently sustained in this State. 
Such as are not in articulation with an institution of higher learning 
will not be efficient. Nor, if established, will they be largely at- 
tended by pupils of high school age who have to go far from home. 
And all around the village high schools there is already " practical " 
agriculture in abundance. It is fully vip to the high school plane. 
Unless there is extreme care at the point where the ways are likely 
to part, there is great danger of projecting roads which will lead 
from, rather than to, the greatest good, not only to New York 
agriculture, but to New York education as well. 

An Agricultural College 

No educational system capable of adequately supporting the agri- 
culture of a state will be complete without an agricultural college. 



122 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

One with experience in developing an agricultural college worthy 
of the name will know that there will not be many of these insti- 
tutions in the same state, no matter how great the state may be. 
In such a college the best scientific training and the deepest scien- 
tific research are imperative. If they are not of the best and the 
deepest they will be of no avail, and they can hardly be such apart 
from the teachers, the investigators, and the laboratories to be 
found at a real university. At a real agricultural college the most 
exact and reliable experiments and demonstrations are also im- 
perative and there are both educational and financial reasons in 
abundance why these wtll not be much duplicated, or often realized 
apart from a university. In all phases of higher education what is 
good is not cheap, and what is cheap is not good. It is no less 
true — doubtless it is more true — in the higher study of agricul- 
ture than in any other phase of advanced education. And the higher 
learning is quite as vital to agriculture as to any other interest of 
the people. Then, a real agricultural college, associated with a true 
university, is the true policy in this State, and such a college may 
be expected to vitalize whatever is done in connection with agricul- 
ture in the high schools ; and whatever has a bearing upon agricul- 
ture in the elementary schools : and it may also be expected to 
incite and uplift profitable agricultural operations among the 
people. Then, whether or not an erroneous initiative has been given 
to provision for agricultural instruction of elementary and second- 
ary grades in this State, we have made no mistake concerning agri- 
cultural teaching of the college grade. 

The State has recently built new agricultural college buildings, 
and provided for developing a real agricultural college, at Cornell 
University. There are those who ask, " Why has not Cornell, with 
New York's share of the land grant funds, developed a real agri- 
cultural college before now? " I am not one of these, because I 
know something of the difficulties which have been in the way. 
These difficulties have persisted until now, but happily they are 
giving way. They have related to the scarcity of competent teach- 
ers with enthusiasm in the subject; to the absence of students who 
could matriculate in a college; to the absence of any actual and 
intelligent interest in agriculture on the part of the universities; 
and to the absence of any rational plan of the agriculturists for 
agricultural education. The western farmers have had more value 
at stake in their farms than we have, and they have had to be more 
aggressive; and the measure of influence, if not of control, which 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS I23 

they have had over the State universities has enabled them to solve 
difficulties and find ways for making agricultural colleges actually 
serviceable. Out of it all, the ways to that end are much clearer 
there and here than they used to be. The available funds of Cor- 
nell have all been used in other directions, and if anything worth 
while was to be done the State has had to do it, and I have been 
very glad that it has done it and not made the mistake, in agricul- 
tural college work at least, of so scattering its benefactions and its 
directions that there would be only indifferent results. 

The Need of Democracy in Agricultural Education 

So far, so good — but that is far from the sum of the matter. 
Before any system of higher education can be of substantial advan- 
tage to farming, it will have to have its head in a democratic and 
a sympathetic, as well as a real, university. Cornell University is a 
real university. Its ideals and its scholarship have been high. Its 
offerings have extended into wide fields, and its equipment has 
been measurably sufficient. But its disposition has never been so 
democratic as its management has desired it to be, or believed that 
it was, and its sympathy with the agricultural industries has never 
been so consuming as to lead it to rise to very high altitudes in 
things agricultural, or to surmount the real obstacles to agricul- 
tural investigation and instruction. It is not the fault of a board 
of trustees, a president, a dean, or a professor. The trouble is 
beyond either. It will never be cured unless the university becomes 
the real instrument of the State, nor until there is a strong factor 
in the board of trustees so keenly interested in agriculture that it 
will use its power to compel the university to accomplish the really 
great agricultural ends which can be effected in no other way. 

In other words, the erection of buildings for a college of agri- 
culture at Cornell University is not enough to insure much result 
to New York agriculture. The gathering of a faculty, the laying 
down of offerings, and the installation of an equipment, are not 
enough. That college will not only have to be as educationally 
respectable as any other college in the university, but it will have 
to stand in vital and living relations with every other. No matter 
how elaborately equipped it may be, it will accomplish relatively 
Httle unless it has the fellowship and the stimulus of the union of 
colleges and graduate school which we call the university. It will 
not bear large fruits unless it has to respond to the demands of a 
real constituency with large interests, nor until the purposes of 



124 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

representatives of that constituency, who have the intelligence and 
the authority to undertake to accomplish particular things, have to 
be met. 

All of the natural sciences, physics, chemistry, zoology, physi- 
ology, bacteriology, embryology, thremmatology ; the social and polit- 
ical sciences, history, economics, the mechanical arts, and divers 
phases of engineering; great practical experience, and a large amount 
of horse sense, are inseparably involved in that high agricultural 
development which must be had in the State of New York if her 
agriculture is to keep pace with the other commercial and intellectual 
activities of the State; Of course, all the people engaged in farm- 
ing can not be equipped with all of this knowledge, but a consider- 
able part of them must be, to the end that they may lead the way; 
and when such men lead the way all the rest will be copying 
larger men and better methods than they have sufficient opportunity 
to copy now. And there must be a place which will not only 
initiate new undertakings and lift old ones to higher planes, but to 
which any occult difficulty may be taken for investigation and 
report. And investigation and teaching, scientific research and the 
training of teachers and superintendents, must go together because 
one is as vital as the other, and each inspires and energizes the 
other. And with it all there must be, in the agricultural college at 
least, the ever present feeling that agriculture is our most im- 
portant business, and that the college which can quicken it has a 
larger mission and is entitled to a fuller reward than any other kind 
of a college which the ingenuity of man and the generosity of a 
people have ever been able to put upon its feet. These specifications 
call for nothing short of a real university under some considerable 
measure of popular control. 

Things Outside of the Schools 
There are things to be done in the interests of New York agri- 
culture, outside of the schools. There need be no squeamishness 
about doing them. There need be no hesitation about asking the 
State to do them when only the State can do them. It is clearly within 
the scope of the political power of the people to promote an over- 
whelming common interest by combined action, when it can not be 
done individually. It is unmistakably so when the people acting 
together actually do so much to enlighten the political and pro- 
fessional life and culture of the State, and when they do so much 
to support so many of the commercial interests of the people. After 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 25 

all that has been done in many other directions, agriculture need not 
hesitate ; and others need not sneer, when agriculture ventures 
and asks. 

For example, we ought to have a competent and complete agricul- 
tural survey made of all of the farming lands of this State. The 
farmers should be told rather closely of the general attributes of 
the soil of the different counties and of its chemical elements as well. 
They should be told, in a general way but with some particularity 
and definiteness, how^ it may be used to the best advantage. One 
may say that they do know. Certainly they know much about it, 
but if the subject were to be intensively inquired into they would 
themselves be surprised at the number of things which have not 
yet occurred to them. Quite as certainly there are some things 
which common usage shows that many of them do not realize. They 
should be told of the additions which are needed to restore what 
has been taken out, or to adapt it to the demands of new situations. 
They should not have to take this from commercial corporations 
that are selling fertilizers. They should not go on putting on stuff 
that contains nitrogen and no phosphorus, when what the ground 
needs is phosphorus and not nitrogen. They should not go on 
selling products containing constituents that the soil requires, when 
they are worth more to keep than to sell. The common belief 
among farmers, that mere rotation of crops rests and recuperates 
the soil, is doubtless fallacious beyond the fact that some crops do 
not deplete soil as rapidly as others do. What has been taken out, 
what needs to be restored, should be declared by competent author- 
ity acting for and responsible to the farming interests. What may 
be profitably grown, having in view the factors in the soil, and the 
facilities for changing those factors, and the new facilities for 
transportation, and the new demands of the markets, ought to be 
asserted by undoubted authority. For example, again, if four fifths 
of all of the farm animals in New York were to be destroyed by 
some noxious disease, it would seem a great hardship, but if the 
pest would discriminate in favor of the one fifth w^hich it spared 
the fact would in the end be a real gain. We are continuing the 
propagation of great herds of mongrel animals which are commonly 
less serviceable than those which we might breed, and which often 
are not worth their keep. We fall far short of producing the best 
horses sufficient for our needs, either for all-around or particular 
service. Every farm ought to have at least one new colt every 
spring. He should have a pedigree that he could be as proud of 
as a Son of the Revolution, or a member of the Mayflower Society. 



126 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

He should not be expected to trot a mile in less than three minutes, 
but by the time he is four years old he should be worth at least 
three hundred dollars and create a sort of savings bank account 
for his owner. We are the first dairy state in the Union, but we 
have much to learn about milk cows and scientific dairying before 
we can be the first dairy country in the world. Of course, we have 
some fine dairy herds, and of course we have some up-to-date 
dairymen, but do any of us doubt that we have hundreds of thou- 
sands of dairy cattle which are too mean to keep, or that the very 
common practices of handling dairy products are alike a menace 
and a disgrace to us? Ample knowledge upon the subject is avail- 
able, and the real prosperity and pleasure of dairying, as well as the 
common safety of the people, depend upon observing it. Why not 
have the State make it known and compel us all to observe it? 
Indeed, why not have the State propagate the most desirable and 
profitable animals of the farm, and actually aid farmers in propa- 
gating such for themselves? There are a half dozen German 
states which have more money invested in buildings and grounds 
for a veterinary college alone, than the State of New York or 
its people have invested in veterinary science since the Mohawk 
began to pour into the Hudson. The Imperial Government of 
Japan has recently been studying the matter of hens, and, with its 
customary habit of taking care, has just sent two trusted representa- 
tives to England to select the finest specimens of two breeds which 
it has decided are best adapted of any in the world to the needs of 
Japan. Why did they not take American hens ? Doubtless because 
they found that all chickens look much alike to most Americans. 
The proof of our indifference to domestic chickens is cumulative. 
Yet our State has $15,000,000 invested in poultry, and there is as 
much difference in the individuality, and the productivity, and the 
respectability, and the value, of hens, as there is in horses, or cattle, 
or sheep, or swine, or people. This is an ideal State for first-class 
chickens and plenty of them, and why should we permit ourselves 
to be the seventh State in the Union when it comes to such attractive 
and money-making creatures of the farm? We smile about it, but 
other peoples make them the subject of governmental care. Then 
there are the other large matters of small fruits, and vegetables, 
and flowers for the markets. Here and there one gets rich through 
the discriminating propagation of one or the other, but most of us 
seem to blindly suppose that they are wholly dependent upon their 
own spontaneity, and that there is nothing to do but to leave them 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 12/ 

to nature and to chance. Yet there are other states and other 
nations which see that it is worth much more than it costs to make 
each of them the subject of the investigations and the teachings of 
a distinct department of a university. Then there is the vital sub- 
ject of horticulture in its larger aspects, with its infinite claims and 
its unspeakable possibilities. The apples, pears, grapes, and nuts ; 
the forests ; the shade trees ; all phases of landscape architecture 
and gardening, demand the oversight and the leadership and the 
aid of the State on both the scientific and practical sides. \et again, 
there is the still larger subject of tlie homemaking, with its archi- 
tecture and sanitation, the matter of decorations, the comforts and 
conveniences, with the adaptation of foods to the family needs, and 
the thousand things which with attention will make the life of the 
mother an easier one, and the possibilities of the children different 
and greater than they otherwise would be. And right there is the 
overwhelming consideration to which all others must be contribu- 
tory, and before which every other pales into insignificance, and 
that is the public need of knowing that boys and girls are the first 
concern of a State; the public obligation to do the material things 
which will dispose every farm boy and farm girl to look upon farm- 
ing not for the sake of the farm more than for their own sake, not 
as repellent drudgery, but as the high grade business that it is. 

All these things are outside of the schools, but they have to pro- 
ceed from the prevalent system of education and they all relate 
back to the schools. In a word, from which there can hardly be 
any dissent, the prosperity and the pleasure of a great industry 
depend upon the completeness, the symmetry, and the cooperative 
efficiency of the parts of the educational system which enter into 
its details and give rationale and character to it as a whole. And 
in another word, from which I do not expect dissent, the states 
which lay the most emphasis upon those phases of learning which 
bear directly upon the mechanical and agricultural industries, and 
which carry them right to the homes of the people, will enjoy the 
largest commercial prosperity and will have the happiest and the 
strongest populations. 

New York Behind in Agricultural Education 

I do not often find myself in the attitude of a critic of the Empire 

State, but it must be said that New York is far from the front in 

developing policies and establishing instrumentalities to aid either 

the mechanical or the agricultural industries. With the prestige 



128 NE'W YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

and the advantage of being an old state, it would be strange if we 
did not suffer some of the disadvantages of it. Let me point out 
what the educational disadvantages concerning agriculture are, and 
why they are, and let us believe that we may cure them if we will. 

The federal Constitution left, as it was bound to leave, univer- 
sities, as all other schools, to be propagated by the states. In every 
state formed after the adoption of " the more perfect union " the 
state Constitution provided for a system of schools, and ordinarily 
for a state university. The western pioneers had a dreadfully hard 
time, but they had the pride and nerve which kept it to themselves. 
They were bound to build up new states to rival the old ones, and 
they realized that a comprehensive educational system was the only 
corner stone which such a new state could have. If they had little 
to do with, they were at least fortunate in the fact that there was 
nothing in the way. Even public universities were established in 
all of the newer states. The people laid the foundations of com- 
prehensive educational systems, and crowned the systems with public 
universities. The potential power of all this has not been realized 
until the coming of wealth within the last twenty-five years. 

Forty-six years ago the general government provided a gift of 
thirty thousand acres of land to each state for each senator and 
representative in Congress, upon condition that the state would use 
the proceeds for the propagation of a university which, without 
ignoring other branches of liberal learning, would lay particular 
emphasis upon those bearing upon agriculture and the mechanic 
arts. The act was passed after a long struggle. It was passed more 
than once. It was vetoed by Buchanan. It was signed by the great 
Lincoln. This act was as epoch making in education as the 
Declaration of Independence was in political progress, or as the 
Ordinance of ^^y was in the advance of public enlightenment and 
morality. 

The newer states had the larger part in procuring its passage, and 
they were the quickest and the keenest to claim their rights under 
it. They had the freer democracy. They were in the pioneer 
stage. They lacked nothing in assertiveness. They wanted all that 
the older states had, and much more. Universal education became 
speedily a universal passion. Their institutions were yet in the 
liquid state. The federal grant would aid their already existent 
state universities, or support others. They had the system which 
could seize the opportunity. Every one of them managed to comply 
with the terms and lay hold upon the grants. For the twenty-five 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS I29 

years following the war, they often had a hard time complying with 
the requirements, but they held on. Then the country had filled up. 
More acres were put under the plow, and all the acres were made 
more productive. Wealth grew. In the eighties, and still more in 
the nineties, land grant institutions had developed more highly edu- 
cated constituencies, and, quite as important, they began to show 
the people who were engaged in the commercial, manufacturing, 
transportation, and agricultural industries, how to make more money. 
That settled it. Nothing succeeds like success. They went after more 
'money and now each gets $50,000 per year beyond the proceeds 
of the land grants. And now, again, every one of the newer states 
puts into its state university or land grant college more than it 
gets from the federal grants, and some of them twenty times as 
much. They are not fools : they are more intent than ever on 
having all of the education that any state has, with some to spare; 
the roads are filled with the coming and going of students. 
Nebraska and Wisconsin each has a larger proportion of college 
students than either New York or Massachusetts. There are grad- 
uates, and therefore trained agents, of the universities in every 
village and upon almost every farm ; and all the people stand ready 
to make further investments where they will pay. They are not 
doing it for mere love. They see that there is money in it. Added 
to the natural educational enthusiasm, that concludes matters. 

The older states did practically nothing. They are only now open- 
ing their eyes. Their ignorance of patent facts is as monumental 
as it is stupid. Of course, the old order is in the way. It is the 
habit of the old order to question the academic quality of the new 
order of institutions. One college president laments that the people 
put their hands into the people's treasury to promote higher educa- 
tion. Another challenges the applicability of liberal learning to the 
industries. Still another says, as bluntly as it can be said in classical 
phrase, that it is all wrong to educate people out of their environ- 
ment. And yet another looks through spectacles that are befogged 
with the literary and philosophical training of the ages, and stoutly 
denies that what actually is, can be. It is not strange. Neither men 
nor institutions can be made over in a minute, after they are fifty 
years of age. The old order is the persistent expression of social, 
political, and educational aristocracy. The new order is the advance 
agent of educational and industrial democracy. The new order is as 
sure to persist as the Republic is to endure, for it is only the logical 
outworking of the democracy of the nation. It is sure to go in every 



130 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

State, for the nation will never endure half slave and half free 
educationally, any more than politically. 

In New York we are as yet in the old order. We are not quite 
so hidebound as some who live in the still more educationally effete 
East. Some men and some facts have helped us. But we are a long 
way from being out in the clear sunlight. We almost lost the 
advantage of the federal grants to higher learning for the masses 
and the industries of the people, and would have done so absolutely 
but for Andrew D. White and Ezra Cornell, both senators of this 
State ; one a scholar and educational organizer, who had been a 
professor in the State University of Michigan, and the other an 
inventor and industrial organizer, a millionaire, and withal a philan- 
thropist. Between them, with these qualities, and being in the 
Senate, they got up the best scheme that was practicable under the 
circumstances, rescued the grant to New York from utter failure 
by providing an endowment and creating an institution which could 
take it and try to meet the State's obligations concerning it. The 
State did nothing. It merely stood by and benevolently let the 
thing be done. The result was Cornell University. I have never 
been quite able to see how the scheme held together and worked out 
legally, but I imagine that, as it cost the State nothing, it was looked 
upon with a good measure of legal and administrative considerate- 
ness, as it certainly deserved to be. By reason of the sagacious loca- 
tion of the State lands, by other gifts, and by hard struggling, a 
great and influential university has grown up on the hillside at 
Ithaca. By reason of the circumstances of its origin, of its impera- 
tive legal obligations, and of the fact that its first two presidents — 
with joint terms of twenty- four years ^ — were professors from the 
University of Michigan, it partook of the form, of many of the 
factors, and of much of the spirit of the state universities. Because 
of the scholarships, and for other reasons, it stands in rather close 
relations to our State system of education. All honor to the men 
who have done it, and to all of the men and women whose sym- 
pathies have entered into it. But it would be idle to say that in any 
essential way it sustains the relation of either a state university or 
an industrial college to the Empire State. It does not, and it can" 
not, because it is not under popular control, and can not be respon- 
sive to the natural impulses of our unfolding political and indus- 
trial : democracy, nor can its practical ministrations be accepted by 
the people as they would be if there were the sense of public pro- 
prietorship in it. 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS I3I 

Aid to Wives and Daughters 

Up to this time we have been thinking about the training which 
essentially relates to men, and about farming operations outside of 
the house. It would be a mistake to leave the subject without a 
word as to the special training of the women who live in the coun- 
try, and as to the education which enters directly into the making 
of the farmer's home. To accomplish any large results men and 
Avomen must not only work together, but they must have equal 
advantages ; they must be equally enthusiastic and aggressive, and 
the work of each must be equally regarded and respected by the 
other. There is a lack of such equality of outlook and opportunity 
in New York education. The women have less chance ; not so much 
special training either in or out of the schools, not so many social 
contacts, not so many implements to do with, and not so much to 
stimulate and liberalize their work either within their own homes 
or in comparisons between ■ different homes. There are notable 
exceptions, but we have necessarily to deal with generalities. Of 
course, I intend no reflections upon a class of women who are 
as justly entitled to the highest respect for doing all they do under 
circumstances that are often discouraging, as they are entitled to 
an open educational chance with the men, which very commonly 
they do not get. If the women could be put in charge of the farm, 
the operations would doubtless go quite as well as they do now ; but 
if the men were to be put in charge of the house, the better part of 
them would either lie down under the burden or there would be so 
many changes and so many new conveniences and fixings and im- 
plements that the treasury would be bankrupted. I am not saying 
that all of the fault is with the men, although a good share of it 
belongs to some men. I once sat behind two farmers' wives 
through an admirable cooking demonstration at a county " domestic 
science " association. At the conclusion one said to the other, " I 
suppose this thing is all right for these city and university women, 
but I can cook without any of their help." Doubtless she could, 
and quite as doubtless she belonged to a class who have as much 
to learn about the most desirable and economical food supplies, and 
the question of nutrition, and the manner of preparation, and the 
time for use. and the manner of serving, as I have to learn about 
a million things. And that is far from all there is of it. It reaches 
to the making, the sanitation, and the decoration of the house, to 
the furnishings and conveniences of the home, to the deep subject 
of home economics and household management, and to all that most 



132 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

effectually brings the vital support of the home to the support of 
the work upon the farm. It may make the life of the family some- 
thing to which ambitious boys and girls will cling; even something 
to which, being added to the rational and cordial welcome of their 
fathers and mothers, they will be proud to invite their friends. 

In a word, in considering the educational needs of New York 
agriculture, the education, the liberal and special education, of 
women claims quite as much as that of men. There is quite as 
much necessity of specialization for girls as for boys, when the 
time for specialization comes. The courses in the secondary 
schools, whatever form the school is to take, are bound to regard 
the work of girls as well as that of boys, and there will be no com- 
plete or symmetrical college of agriculture unless there is associated 
with it a department of household economy, with the many Ofiferings 
which go to the bottom of all the problems of the household upon 
the farm. Nor will there be sufficient result until the need of it is 
recognized among the people. And it may as well be added that, 
when such courses are provided, there will not be much result 
unless girls can go and take them with just as much independence, 
and security, and common respect as any boy upon the grounds. If 
this can not be until boys are taught some lessons, the date of enter- 
ing upon that process should not be long postponed. 

Suggestions 

In summary, I submit the following suggestions concerning the 
educational basis of the agricultural industries : 

There should be a complete and interrelated system of schools, 
elementary, secondary, and higher, open to all, and essentially under 
the control of the people of the State. 

The elementary school should be within reach of every farmer's 
home. So long as the school is adequately sustained and com- 
petently taught, the location may be left to the people of the district. 
It is more a question of expediency than of educational principle, 
and there is no balance of advantages in school concentration to 
justify forcefully overthrowing an established order. 

The elementary schools are to teach the elements of an all- 
around English education. They can not specialize much, and they 
are not to be in any sense exclusive. They are to aim at fitting 
children for the choice of any vocation they may prefer and for 
beginning the preparation therefor. They are always to preach the 
gospel of work, and to use books, objects and methods to stimulate 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 33 

quite as much interest — and in the country perhaps more interest — 
in agriculture as in any other industry. This should be guarded in 
making the elementary syllabus. The work of the elementary 
schools, in the country as in the cities, should not dawdle and waste 
time through the multiplicity of books and the idle exploitation of 
pedagogical theories and methods. It should be definite quantitively, 
as well as efficient qualitively. The attendance laws should be en- 
forced in the country as in the cities, even though the extent of child 
labor upon the farm, and the distance of the school makes neglect 
of the law very frequent and the difficulties of enforcement very 
great. The course should be simplified and shortened, and the child 
brought to the end of it with the assurance that he has some defi- 
nite knowledge and measure of efficiency, by the time he is fourteen 
years of age. Better professional supervision should establish some 
satisfactory basis of graduation from a country elementary school, 
and graduation should qualify the pupil for admission to the high 
school, or to a distinct agricultural school. 

There should be an approved high school within driving dis- 
tance of every home. In this school there must be provision for 
an all-around high school training which will fit for college or tech- 
nical school, and there should be a distinct cleavage in the interest 
of agriculture where pupils will elect it. Where there is sufficient 
demand for it to justify a distinct agricultural school of secondary 
grade, on a parallel with the trades schools which we are beginning 
to organize in the cities, and such course can be taken without 
weakening the established high schools, as it may be in the cities, 
argument will go some way to support a distinct agricultural as well 
as a distinct trades school ; but I never expect to concede that agri- 
culture does not rest upon a broader basis than mechanics, and that 
the management of a farm does not exact a wider field of knowl- 
edge than the training of workmen. Whether special training in 
agriculture be carried on in the established high schools or in dis- 
tinct schools is largely a matter of expediency and convenience. 
Let it be done in the neighboring village high school, or in a dis- 
tinct school to be developed by a combination of districts or towns, 
or possibly by all the towns of a county, or wherever it promises to 
be most convenient and best. But, wherever done, it must train 
both boys and girls, and expect that they will live at home. The 
work must be fundamental to agriculture : that is. it must teach the 
natural sciences, something of economics, much of common business 
usage, and a great deal of the simpler phases of agronomy, horti- 



134 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

culture, floriculture, vegetable culture, animal husbandry including 
dairying, home making, or anything else connected with the indus- 
tries of the farm, so long as it can be done with the facilities which 
are practicable in such a school, with the life of the home and all 
the surrounding environment for illustration and experiment. But 
the general training should go far enough to largely relieve the 
student from the study of the English branches if he goes to the 
agricultural college. It is of a grade of book work which may be 
quite as well done in the local school, and the student should not be 
sent to the college so -deficient in the ordinary English branches as 
to make it necessary for the college to devote much time to it to the 
exclusion of work in technical ag'riculture. And the technical 
agriculture in the high school should count as much as any other 
work in credits, and also for admission to the agricultural college 
for those who will be disposed to go there. 

It would have been better if we could have well considered, 
and have reached definite conclusions concerning schools of agri- 
culture of secondary grade, before any such schools were at- 
tempted by the State. Certainly others should not be provided for 
unless after full consideration and upon some well understood plan. 
If the established schools are not to undertake this work, and the 
State is to do it directly, and there are to be forty or sixty of these 
schools, and if they are to meet real educational standards, then 
there is little to regret. If not, and if some agricultural work is to 
be done in the present high schools, and if a small number of these 
State schools can be firmly established between the existent high 
schools and the agricultural college, they might justify their cost. 
But there are real difficulties in the way. It is likely to be hard 
enough for them to secure enough intending' agricultural students 
and provide enough real agricultural instruction to justify their 
cost, when they are associated with a college or university, as at 
St Lawrence and Alfred. It is quite possible, however. It will 
prove impossible for one which is wholly independent of a college 
to do that, unless the State is to make a college, and not a high 
school, of it ; and that would mean an expense which has not been 
thought of, and a rival to the State College at Cornell which has 
not been intended. It has been suggested that the proposed school 
at Morrisville, which is as yet wholly unorganized, be transferred to 
Colgate University, an excellent institution but five or six miles 
away, and the suggestion seems worthy of serious considera- 
tion. It might be held to be unthinkably cruel for the State to 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 35 

wholly recall any institution of this kind which it had once agreed 
to provide, and I would be glad enough if the State would establish 
such a school at every college in the State which would be strength- 
ened by, or be hospitable to it, if, after discussion, it should be 
thought well to make that the general plan. But the State educa- 
tional system would like to know just what the educational policy 
of the State concerning secondary instruction in agriculture is to be. 
It will be good State policy to give liberal support to the State 
College of Agriculture and expect to make large demands upon it. 
An agricultural college is bound to be a college as much as any 
other kind of institution which claims the name of college. Strong 
teachers and many offerings will have to precede the coming of 
students. No state will be likely to support more than one that will 
make much of an impression upon its agriculture. The offerings 
must be largely in agricultural technique. The equipment should be 
even larger in fields and barns and herds, than in libraries and lab- 
oratories, because the student should have a reasonable English 
education before he goes to college, and because when an agricul- 
tural college has the large advantage of being a college in a univer- 
sity, it may count much upon the privileges which are common to 
all. By the time one who is to live on a farm goes awa)'' from home 
to an agricultural college, it is time he was given his fill of agricul- 
tural instruction that is actual and real. But a real college, properly 
sustained by the schools below, will gather students who can 
matriculate and thus make an impression upon the State which will 
endure. The State Agricultural College must be sensitive to rational 
and responsible agricultural initiative. It must not only train men 
to manage farms, but it must train teachers for agricultural work in 
the schools below. It must be scholarly, but it must be as demo- 
cratic as it is scholarly. There are people who think that impossible. 
Therein lies the difference between the old academic scholarship 
and the newer industrial scholarship. Other states have found that 
difference and reckoned with it more than once. We can beat them 
all if we will. The State Agricultural College must not only be 
sensitive to the initiative of others ; it must have an initiative of its 
own. It must find out the things which New York agriculture 
needs to have done and go right ahead doing them, knowing that 
if they work it will get the glory, and if they fail it will be damned 
for it. Teaching and research must go together. They always help 
one another. The State College of Agriculture and the United 
States and New York State Agricultural Experiment Stations are 



136 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

bound to supplement each other. Ithaca and Geneva are not far 
apart, and the roads between them are very pleasant. Between 
them they are bound to investigate, supply information, and have 
an opinion upon every problem a New York farmer will bring to 
them, and when they do it the New York farmers are bound to 
listen to them. They are to supply energy and guidance to every 
farmers' organization and every agricultural enterprise. In theory 
and in fact they are to assume the leadership in a great system of 
education which adequately supports our fundamental and our 
greatest industry. 

We should enter upon a great system of agricultural extension. 
The schools, from highest to lowest, should act in accord, not only 
in training students and in scientific research, but in carrying knowl- 
edge to the very doors of the farmers. Evangelistic work in agri- 
culture should go everywhere. Seed specials should be run over 
the railroads. The blood of the best farm animals should be dis- 
tributed throughout the State. Object lessons of special interest to 
both men and women should be carried in all directions. The 
applications should be especially adapted to every section, and the 
fullest attention should be given to the less favored rather than to 
the more favored counties of the State. 

I hesitate not a moment in saying that the State might well send 
a commission of practical farmers and trained scientists, or, perhaps 
better, a commissioner who is experienced in farming, informed in 
economics, and trained scientifically, to any country in the world 
that seems able to send us anything in the way of farm products or 
domestic animals that will be of advantage to us, with authority to 
buy, and directions to learn whatever would be of advantage to our 
agriculture. I noticed in the New York papers of this morning that 
New Jersey has just imported fourteen Percheron and Clydesdale 
horses to extend the breeding of these magnificent draft horses 
among her people. And I know of another State which has sent one 
man to Germany to study veterinary colleges, another to Denmark 
to study dairying, and a third to Argentine to investigate beef cattle. 
There are scores of similar subjects which individuals can not ex- 
ploit because they do not know what to do, or are without the money 
or the inclination to engage in large undertakings. In such cir- 
cumstances it is clearly within the functions of the State to act. 
There is no smack of paternalism or socialism about it. All good 
governments do it in order to aid the industries of the people. It 
involves no large amount of money, in view of the sums to which 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 37 

the State is accustomed. But it can not be done by agents who 
know Httle about it or who are more concerned about themselves 
than about the enduring interests of a great State. If honestly and 
capably done, the sentiment of the State would cordially sustain it. 
And if it were done through the State Agricultural College, or the 
Agricultural Experiment Station, or one of the State schools of 
agriculture, there would be sufficient assurance that whatever was 
undertaken would be scientifically initiated and well and wisely 
carried out. 

Conclusion 

There are perhaps three great fundamental factors in the dis- 
tributive wealth of a state; namely, natural resources, commercial 
situation, and the intelligence which puts them to the very best use. 
The largest factor in natural resources is doubtless the tillable 
soil. We can not claim that the proportion of our potential soil to 
acreage is equal to that of some of the prairie states, but there is no 
doubt whatever that, with existing farm values, our soil may be made 
to yield quite as large a return upon investment as that of any other 
state. Aside from that, nature has been exceedingly kind to us. In 
the association of arable lands with mountains, and rivers, and lakes, 
and forests, and glens, and waterfalls, and with rainfalls and 
climate, and all that stimulates the imagination and makes for the 
physical and moral health of the people, we stand second to no state 
in the Union. In the association of all this with commercial situa- 
tion, we easily have the advantage of them all. And we will never 
admit that we lack the sense or the wits to act together and make 
the most of what nature and situation have done for us. 

We have much to demoralize our thinking, but we may well 
remember that the things in the life of a people which are of 
utmost and enduring worth invariably go back to Mother Earth. 
Manufactures are dependent. Importations are uncertain. We 
may not always take toll of the commerce that comes through both 
our eastern and our western doors and is carried over our highways. 
Our great metropolitan city may not always be the clearing house 
of the nation's business, and even though it is, the profits will con- 
tinue to go into relatively few hands. Mother Earth will never 
forsake and 'she will never deceive us. Neither will she permit us 
to trifle with her. One who can not afiford to lose, can not afford to 
speculate in uncertain and demoralizing crops any more than in 
uncertain and demoralizing securities. Nor can he afford to go on 
in the way which did well enough when we were wholly an agricul- 



138 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

tural people, when children were seasoned through doing their 
share of the work, when books were few, and when the simple dis- 
trict school joined with the work of the farm to support a simple, 
but none the less a noble, civilization. We will be misguided if we 
do not continue to abide with Mother Earth and follow the course 
which will continue to make the most of her. 

And we shall be a witless as well as a misguided people if we do 
not combine to ascertain from the reports of the markets and the 
work of the laboratories what may be done without much risk, and 
if we do not adjust ourselves to the more complex, the more intelli- 
gent, and the better life' of our day in a way which will enable our 
properties to get our share out of it. The farmhouse will have to 
have the essential conveniences and connections of the city house. 
The boys and girls will have to have the things which they know 
other boys and girls have. The young men and maidens will have 
to have a good time of it and be able to find the ways for meeting 
their reasonable ambitions. The shorter working day and all the 
better conditions of labor will have to be reckoned with. The com- 
fort, and the enlightenment, and the moral betterment of all in the 
household will have to be sedulously studied and generously pro- 
vided for. 

Of course the' social, and educational, and industrial combination 
will give help to such as accord with it and are capable of making 
use of its advantages, but the personal equation will have to settle 
things upon each farm, and the personal attributes of the individual 
farmer will have to prevail. But while, no matter what the general 
level of intelligence and sagacity, some will fail and complain, and 
some will prosper and be happy, yet, there is no doubt about the 
public attitudes and the common undertakings of a people being 
often vital to the progress of men and women who deserve to 
prosper. In this sense the people and the government of New York 
have occasion enough to do much to widen the door of opportunity 
to all of our agricultural industries. 

To find the true and sure ways for widening that door, a new 
body of learning is quite as necessary as old-time practical experi- 
ence in farming. It is no easy task. Both educationists and farm- 
ers will have to bury their conceits and enter upon the breaking out 
of new roads with all modesty of opinion. 

Governor Hughes has given us an admirable Commissioner of 
Agriculture. Liberally and specially educated, in full sympathy with 
the new spirit of agriculture, with youth and ambition and yet with 



AGRICULTURE AND ITS EDUCATIONAL NEEDS 1 39 

considerable experience and undoubted effectiveness in administra- 
tion, the appointment of JMr Pearson to the headship of the agri- 
cultural activities of the State is altogether timely and encouraging. 
I am anxious that the forces which he and I represent shall work in 
rational cooperation, and that each shall bring out the best there 
is in learning and in labor. A new system of agriculture and a new 
system of education will have to join forces. Farmers and educa- 
tionists will have to join hands in arranging the details of a new 
system of education and in making new plans about work. I am 
sure we have all come to the time when we shall be glad to have 
it so. If we have, the rest of it will not be so difficult after all. Both 
agriculture and education will be the gainers by it. Our education 
will more completely aid the evolution of our industrial democracy, 
our education will be quickened by enlarged industrial efficiency, 
and our agriculture will more surely come into the possession of its 
own again. 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD 

ADDRESS BEFORE THE NATIONAL CHILD LABOR COMMITTEE AT ITS 
FIFTH ANNUAL MEETING, CHICAGO, ILL., JANUARY 22, I9O9 

It is yet to be proved that a wide-open democracy like ours can 
do some of the things which a well ordered political society needs 
to have done, as well as more centralized forms of government do 
them with apparent ease. Indeed, it is yet to appear that we can 
make good the fundamental principle of our political creed and 
assure equality of right and opportunity to every one. Of course, 
there are compensations for the fact, but it is a fact. 

The door of opportunity opens wider here than in any other 
nation in the world. The passion of the United States is that 
every one shall have his chance. We provide primary, second- 
ary, and higher instruction, practically free of cost, to all. The 
teaching is efficient and the equipment is ample, often sumptuous. 
The spirit that supports it all is delightful. The school budget 
is the one tax of which no good American has the hardihood to 
complain. The road to and through and between the schools is 
a broad highway. It has no breaks and no very heavy grades. 
No sect, no party, no social set, no commercial interest, is allowed 
to obstruct it. So much is settled and everywhere accepted. It 
is more than settled and accepted. Wealth, society, business, re- 
ligion and political sagacity find their security, and their pleasure 
in continually enlarging and strengthening the educational ideal. 

The road to accomplishment, and to fame, is as open and as free 
as that to the schools. Education is not only the universal Amer- 
ican passion, but hope, cheer, courage, are the words which the 
most beautiful and brilliant flag in the world whispers in the ears 
of all, native born or adopted, who live where it casts its shadow. 
A national temperament which is being warmed by the interming- 
ling of the blood, the experiences, and the ideals of all the peoples 
of the world; which has been ennobled by the constantly enlarging 
opportunities and continually increasing influence of women ; which 
has been incited by innumerable individual successes ; and which 
has been made very confident if not very vain by the always un- 
folding magnificence of the governmental plan, is stirred to its 
very depths by the opportunities and the inspirations of the Amer- 

[140] 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I4I 

ican Republic. The millions who are mature enough to feel it, and 
who have not been borne down by conditions which are well nigh 
insurmountable, are struggling, in season and out of season, to make 
the most of it. The spectacle is brilliant enough to stir the wonder, 
if not the jealousy, of the world. Nothing short of the Gloria in 
excelsis can express our heartfelt appreciation of it all. 

Would that there were no word of qualification or ground 
for apprehension. But there is, and we are old enough and strong 
enough to look each other in the face and say it. Our general 
characterization expresses great and proud truths, and perhaps the 
larger part of the whole truth ; but still it is only a part of the 
whole truth. The undisclosed" part is that we count a mere open- 
ing for some as the equal chance for all. It is not so : one must 
be helped to a place where he may enter the door of opportunity, 
before he has any share in the equal chance for all. Leaving 
further applications of the principle to be made by others, it is 
.ny mission to this conference to say that all American children 
must be given the implements with which to make their way in our 
busy civilization, before it can be said that our political system is 
sufficiently efficient, or that equality of chance is held out to every 
one. 

Fifty years ago we were discussing just such a question as this, 
and the great Lincoln, right here in the city of Qiicago and the 
state of Illinois, was piercing the fallacy that political freedom 
covered the right to do wrong. Senator Douglas, a very great man, 
was saying that the territories should have free constitutions and 
be left to vote slavery up or down according to their inclinations ; 
but the greatest of all Illinoisans and the greatest of all Americans, 
answered, " No, that is but temporizing with an inherent wrong." 
It would be logical, he said, if slavery were ever right; but for one 
man to claim the right to eat his bread in the sweat of another 
man's brow, save as the result of free contract or pursuant to 
bad laws already duly enacted, was essentially immoral. Slavery 
might be tolerated for a time where it was established by law. be- 
cause even that might be better than a fratricidal war which might 
sever the union of the states and present an insuperable obstacle 
to a further democratic advance; but freedom was to be voted up 
and slavery must be voted down by the common action of a free 
nation, when it came to territory that was already free. The moral 
sense of the people saw the point, and used the man to carry tlie 
great principle to a consummation which saved the nation. 



142 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Slavery to ignorance is no less slavery than the slavery of a serf 
to an overlord. It is the inherent right of the American child to 
be or to become free from both. The possession of at least the ele- 
mentary powers to read and write, by which he may gain knowledge 
and make the most of himself, is an essential part of his freedom. 
Such possession by all the people of a free country is the country's 
most valuable property. It is the property of all. Every one under 
a free constitution has just as much of a property interest in the 
literacy and the efficiency of every other as he has in the perform- 
ance of any other legal or moral compact. No one can waive it for 
himself, through his youth or his ignorance, because of the mutual- 
ity of all the obligations of the universal compact. He can not 
lose it by misfortune for which he is not responsible. If he is inca- 
pable of asserting the right for himself, the legal organization set 
to enforce the terms of the compact is bound to enforce it for him. 
The right of every one to read is not to be voted up or down, as a 
eity, a county, a district, or a parent may please to vote. This is 
essentially so in a democracy, and more particularly in a democracy 
with ideals like ours. The illiteracy of an American citizen whose 
childhood has been passed in America is unlawful and essentially 
immoral. Education, an essential of freedom, is always to be voted 
up and everywhere enforced in a republic. 

These are not idle words. In America, where we offer more 
education to every citizen than does any other country in the world, 
there are more people who can not read or write in any language 
than there are in any other constitutional country in the world. The 
attendance upon the primary schools is less complete and regular 
than in any other well ordered nation upon the globe. In Chicago 
or New York tliere is a much larger percentage of people ten 
years old or more who can neither read nor write, than there is in 
London, or Paris, or Berlin, or Zurich, or Copenhagen, or even 
Tokio. 

Illiteracy is almost a negligible quantity in the German Empire, 
in France, Switzerland, the Scandinavian countries, and even in 
Japan. As I was preparing this address I had the pleasure of a 
call from Dr Koht, professor of modern history in the University 
of Christiania. I asked him how many children there were in the 
Scandinavian countries, ten years old, who could neither read nor 
write. He said not any. He seemed surprised at the question. In 
the State of New York there are 55 in a thousand, and in Illinois 42 
in a thousand. 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I43 

It is easily explained. The immigration is an inadequate explana- 
tion. Immigrants from the highly or uniformly educated nations 
go far to offset those from the peoples where education is less 
diffused. Immigrants are often more jealous than native Americans 
of their opportunities in the schools. They commonly settle in the 
cities, where the schools are convenient and where all the people 
are accustomed to some measure of compulsion. There is a larger 
percentage of illiterate children of native born than of foreign, born 
parents in the State of New York. This statement is also true 
of Illinois. There is often a larger percentage of illiteracy in the 
country than in the cities. The explanation is not a very com- 
placent one. It is in the fact that we know little of national eco- 
nomics ; that we have not acquired the habit of taking care, and 
particularly in the fact that we have a popular conception of free- 
dom which does not include the vital necessity of proper restraint 
and compulsion as to all. It is because of our unfortunate dis- 
position to let people do as they please, upon condition that they 
let us do as we please. It is because we are so indift'erent in our 
self-confidence, so wilful, resourceful, and optimistic. 

Probably no one will deny that we have as complete a system 
of school attendance and child labor laws in New York as in any 
state. They are not complete, but are measurably so for America. 
They are harmonious. The Labor and Education Departments 
are in accord. It looks as though the labor laws are very well en- 
forced. Behind them there are strong, influential, and determined 
bodies of citizens — the labor organizations, who have direct in- 
terest in the execution of the laws which prescribe the ages, the 
hours, and all of the conditions where many people work together. 
These organizations not only enforce the laws but they create 
sentiment. Even the execution of the laws of itself makes senti- 
ment. Direct interest gives energy and strength to the arm of 
the law. And even those people who have no direct interest, and 
who do not think much about it anyway, get in the habit of think- 
ing that what happens all of the time ought to happen. 

School attendance laws are without organized help. Sentiment is 
quite indifferent. Indeed, there is a not uncommon feeling that 
it is below the dignity of the State to be hunting up little children 
to make them go to school, and quite apart from the proper feel- 
ings of the well-to-do to be punishing poor or unworthy parents 
for not keeping their children in school. This feeling is much more 
common in the country and in smaller towns than in the larger 



144 ^EW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

cities. But it exists everywhere. The officers of the law look upon 
the enforcement of school laws as beyond their realm. The police 
very nearly revolt against it. The local magistrates refuse to impose 
punishments. It is not strange ; it is not wholly unworthy : they 
have sympathy, and they deal with so much squalor and with what 
seems to them so much more serious matters, that they are glad 
to take a promise and let the thing go : sometimes they are think- 
ing about votes at the next election, but oftener they are simply 
expressing the very common feeling or indifference of the country. 
The execution of the school laws is largely left to school officers 
and, without the interested aid of the officers charged with the 
enforcement of the penal laws, the school officers are pretty nearly 
helpless. The mercury which measures American public sentiment 
upon enforcing school attendance is well down to the freezing point. 
Legislators dislike to add to the efficiency of attendance laws, and 
governors are even more reluctant to suggest discipline upon sub- 
ordinate officers who persistently refuse to make them effective. In 
other words, we have the disadvantages as well as the advantages 
of democracy. 

If our country were simply one great business corporation, with 
" no body to be kicked and no soul to be damned," which was ex- 
pecting to continue indefinitely and was always looking for profits, 
its officers! would do all they could to enlarge the efficiency of boys 
and girls, because they would know that such efficiency was the thing 
above all others to reinforce life and assure the repetition of divi- 
dends. If we had a king whom we sustained in the delusion or 
pretense that he was a sort of father to us all, he would be likely 
to adopt methods to enlarge our productivity, without letting any 
of us get out of what he conceived to be our proper places, because 
productivity would be translated into revenues. If our country were 
an empire, bounded by rival empires, and likely at any time to 
have to fight for territory and for life, things would be arranged 
to make each of us contribute to the military power of the empire. 
And intellectual acumen, versatility, craftsmanship, the working 
habit, are larger factors than mere physical strength in the con- 
stituent elements of military power. If our country were a con- 
stitutional monarchy, or even a republic where thought and polit- 
ical power were not very free ; where there was an inherited autoc- 
racy and superimposed aristocracy, with a false " culture " which 
inbreeding was degrading into insipidity, every one of us would 
be used for what there was in us to hold up the props which sup- 
port the roofs. 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I45 

Our scheme of government is not like that of any other people. 
Our thinking and our outlook are peculiar to ourselves. We have 
shown that we can govern ourselves. We have shown that in 
infinite and overwhelming ways our plan is stable and secure 
enough, and our ways open the door of opportunity to the individual 
and the mass. The great heart of our nation is not yearning for 
aristocracy, or empire, or military power. It does not even want 
a kind or a measure of learning that is not in equilibrium and in 
sympathy with work. We want to bear a great nation's honorable 
and instructive part in the progress of the world. Beyond what good 
neighborliness and good morals impose, we do not wish to meddle 
with the affairs of other peoples. We do not wish them to do more 
concerning our affairs. As they do not seem so disposed, and as 
no one suspects that we would allow it if they did, there is no 
occasion to bluster about it. But in the interests of neighborliness 
and good morals we have some lessons to learn, as well as some to 
impart. 

We do not believe in the government using the people, but we do 
believe in the people using the government. We would use this 
government for a double purpose — to keep us all in good legal and 
moral relations with all the world, and to assure peace, security, 
equality of right and the utmost of opportunity to every soul in the 
Republic. All that is inbred in us, but there is one thing that is 
not, and that is regard for common possessions and responsibility 
for the brother who is in bonds. It would of course be absurd to 
say that this is true of all of us, because those among us who have 
been the most successful in business have commonly become our 
noblest benefactors, and because vital occasions always develop a 
moral sense which may be counted upon ; but it is not too much to 
say that, with all of our opportunities and all of our encouragement, 
there is no national policy and no national conscience in America 
which use the authority of the nation to universalize and conserve 
the efficiency of men and women. 

We are a wasteful people. We have never studied economy. We 
have never acquired the habit of taking care. Other peoples would 
live sumptuously out of the difference between what they would 
get and what we do get out of our properties. We know nothing 
of the potentiality of our resources. When we fall short we start 
out to find new fields rather than to find ways for increasing the 
productivity of old fields. And, unhappily, loose habits react upon 
ourselves. They actually make us profligate of our boys and girls. 



146 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

Just now we are enjoying a little breeze of prudence about 
natural resources. For once the statesmen and the orators and the 
magazines and the newspapers are en rapport with the professors 
of economics and the political economists generally, to make us 
more saving of wood and water and coal and oil and iron than we 
are. The agricultural colleges are telling us how to get more out 
of our lands, and admonishing us that if we don't treat them better 
and use more fertilizers they will stop yielding their fruits in sea- 
son. We do more to conserve wild animals than tame ones. All 
the states are protecting moose and deer and fish and wild chickens. 
In New York we have taken up the cause of chipmunks and wood- 
chucks, and would have done it for wolverines and gophers and 
badgers and prairie dogs if there were any. Such a wave of pru- 
dence is as exhilarating and encouraging as it is unprecedented and 
timely in America. When we get started in conserving we are 
likely to do a great deal of it. Surely we will not stop at the border 
line of human interest, and when the issue comes to be a moral one 
we will not forever hesitate at the point where it is necessary to 
compel people to do some things as well as not to do other things. 

Resources alone can never provide the ballast necessary to the 
equipoise of a nation. The vital factors in a nation's existence, to 
say nothing of a nation's beneficence and moral progress, are 
human. In the economics of nation building, the overwhelming 
concern will have to be about boys and girls. In all history, men 
and women have overcome the scarcity of resources and the difficul- 
ties of situation. There are compensations in the economics of 
God. Strong and sane peoples have used slender resources and 
hard situations to work out overwhelming results. Unsubstantial 
and frivolous peoples have been overcome by the very plentitude 
of materials and the very advantage of situation. Great peoples 
have made themselves the greater by overcoming the hardness of 
situation. But no people has ever grown great unless tradition or 
the force of circumstances or intellectual prescience was larger 
than the material factors in the compounding of its future. Poverty 
or a sufficiency rather than inordinate wealth helps nations as well 
as individual men and women. 

We are wealthy in natural resources. In woods and waters and 
mines we are a " millionaire " nation. We have no conception of 
the potential possibilities of our boundless areas of tillable lands, 
for we have never had to make the most of them. We hold a low 
estimate of the possibilities of domestic animals. We do not realize 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I47 

the wealth that is yet in our mountains. We have even less appre- 
ciation of the associated worth of our hills and valleys and low- 
lands; of our lakes and streams and cascades; of the rains and dews 
that nourish us, and of the climate that stimulates us to make the 
most of material things. We have endless coasts washed by the two 
great oceans ; deep, sheltered harbors in all latitudes ; and the busy 
highways of the nations are and must ever be across the lands and 
waters that are under our flag. 

But we have more than wealth of natural resources. History, 
tradition, severe fighting for freedom, the hard struggles of 
pioneers, much thinking, and strong moral j)urpose, have been the 
warp, as the wealth of a new continent has been the woof, 
of our civilization. There was something in the blood of our 
fathers; there is something in the blood which all the nations are 
continually sending to us ; something in the compounding of the 
English nation, and something more in the compounding of the 
American nation ; something in the factors which have produced, 
and something in the results which have grown out of, the steady 
advance of religious and political freedom through a thousand years, 
to make us a keen, quick, alert, and ambitious people. This in 
turn is disclosing our enormous natural wealth. It is also disclosing 
our cunning, our avarice, our pertinacity. Is our political system 
going to be equal to the new strains which the new situations put 
upon it? We have no doubt of it. But there is enough about it all 
to challenge the wisdom of the generation that is here, and to 
quicken the red blood of the one that is coming on. 

" Conserving natural resources," if not an American phrase, has 
an American meaning. It describes a movement to stop a few 
great characters, through a few overpowering corporations to which 
we have delegated much of the power which belongs to all of us in 
common, from getting our common possessions into their own 
hands, or from despoiling great inheritances which have come to us 
in common. This does not necessarily mean anything against these 
great characters : most of us admire most of them. Often they are 
as great in their patriotism and in their rational generosity as in 
their business sagacity. It means nothing, necessarily, against the 
corporations. Their development of resources has been a neces- 
sary^ force in the development of a new country. It means merely 
that the time has come for a little more assertion of common rights 
in common property. It is more against a further absorption that 
is coming to amount to sequestration of our goods, than against a 



148 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

national profligacy that has riot yet put us in sore straits. The out- 
come of so much of " conservation " seems hopeful. Certainly it is 
grateful. But it is to be feared that greater prudence in the use of 
whatever goods each of us can lawfully gather will not seize upon us 
until we are in a tighter pinch than now. 

And with all of our national wastefulness we are more profligate 
of childhood than of any other factor in the nation's life. We are 
not only lax about requiring attendance upon the schools, but we 
have pretty nearly given over the control and direction of children 
who live at home and exist in the regular order. The common au- 
thority presumes too much upon the proper exercise of the author- 
ity of parents. It does not take into account the number of parents 
who are so vicious or weak that they have no right to have children, 
or the number of unfortunate children who would be better off if 
they were orphans. And, largely through the influence of a senti- 
mentalism that is fully half bad, the children in three quarters of the 
better homes and in the schools are given their own sweet way to an 
extent which weakens their characters for life. 

And we can not exculpate the schools. They are as wasteful of 
child life as are the homes. From the bottom to the top of the 
American educational system we take little account of the time of 
the child. We are anxious to do everything under the sun, and to 
put into the young head of a child all that he is ever expected to 
know. The sentimental and well-meaning people load everything 
upon us. So we have eight or nine elementary grades for work 
which would be done in six if we were working for productivity 
and power. We have shaped our secondary schools so that they 
confuse the thinking of youth and break the equilibrium between 
education, and vocations, and people, and industries. And our uni- 
versity faculties divide up the time of students between their de- 
partments with as much enthusiasm as a young surgeon goes at an 
autopsy. The departments get what they must have to sustain 
themselves and the subjects get the consequences of it. They pay 
for it in time or in attenuated courses and unremunerated work. 
The training is for the professions, and if the universities are let 
alone the students will not be ready for life before they are thirty 
years of age. That keeps yotmg people unmarried and unsettled 
too long, and it works havoc in life in obvious wa3^s. 

In the graded elementary schools of the State of New York 
less than half of the children remain to the end of the 
course. They do not start early enough. They do not 



CONSERVING CHILDHCXDD I49 

attend regularly enough. The course is too full of mere peda- 
gogical method, exploitation, and illustration, if not of kinds and 
classes of work. The terms are too short, and the vacations too 
long. It all overworks and worries teachers so that to live at all 
they have to have short terms. More than half the children drop 
out by the time they are fourteen or fifteen, the limits of the com- 
pulsory attendance age, because the work of the schools is behind 
the age of the pupils and we do not teach them the things which lead 
them and their parents to think it will be worth their while to remain. 

The compulsory attendance age should begin at six, or at seven 
at the most, and the course should be freed from everything not of 
fundamental importance to the early training of a child. I am not 
for going back to the simple work of a half century ago. I am 
quite aware of the fact that the child is to live in a complex civiliza- 
tion. But I am sure that there is no need to teach him, before he is 
fourteen years of age, everything that it may ever be well for him to 
know. I am quite sure that it is desirable to induce society to ex- 
pend its devotion to culture upon the school grounds and the school- 
house, and leave the children to bathe in the sunlight of these things 
while the teachers are allowed to train them in the things they must 
know in order to be self-supporting and a support to the state. 
And I am no less sure that the multiplicity of books and appliances, 
and the endless exploitation and illustration in the teaching, may 
well be severely reduced. Anyway, it is not often a question of 
what or how it may be well to teach a child if the element of time 
is not to 'be considered : generally it is a question of what we can 
teach him before he is fourteen years old that will be of most 
worth to him in after years. 

There is another side of this subject that is staring right at us. 
That is the unpreparedness of children for any vocation which is 
not literary or professional ; the undue public and school influence 
upon ambitious temperaments to choose mental rather than manual 
work ; and the utter indifference of the educational system in the 
past to the intellectual and industrial equilibrium of the country. 

Now I am not saying or implying that a poor boy shall not enter 
a profession or aspire to any position in the land. That is for him 
to settle. The roads are to be open to every child no matter under 
what sort of a roof he is born. There is not only one road, but 
many: and he is not to be persuaded by always present injunctions 
and implications to ent^r one particular road when there is grave 
doubt about it being the best one for him. All the roads are to be 



150 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

made good, and his all-around qualities are to be trained until he 
sees the road which seems the best to himself. 

The finest successes come not so much from learning as from 
doing, and an educational system which does not recognize that 
fact and act up to it needs radical reforming. The conspicuous 
successes in life do not attend those who are the star students upon 
commencement morning, more than those who find something that 
they can do and who do it with all their might. I have been sur- 
prised at the number of college men who gain success, although for 
one reason or another they left college without a degree. The 
captains are those who can command. We have been trying to im- 
pose upon labor a leadership which was not accustomed to labor 
and did not know any too much about the details of labor. We 
have trained for culture and for expertness and for examinations. 
It is time to train for craftsmanship, and let workmen of character 
and efficiency forge to the front. They will do it anyway even 
though the signals are set against them, or else there will be little 
accomplishment and small progress. Why not arrange the scheme 
so as to make it easier for them to do it? 

If we are to do anything substantial in the way of conserving 
American childhood, we shall have to control it; we shall have to 
insure its attendance upon instruction, and we shall have to train it 
to efficiency of hand even more than smartness of head. Character 
will come out of labor before competency will come out of mere 
culture of mind. How long shall we proceed upon the fundamental 
mistake that there is any culture worth the name which does not 
grow out of work, or any real manliness or womanliness which has 
not proceeded from things that have been done? I am not saying 
that, necessarily, the things done must have been done by the hand, 
but I do think that the culture is likely to be deeper and the char- 
acter stronger if the things done have been done in the sweat of 
the brow. 

We need a new order of public schools ; a system on parallel 
lines with the literary high schools; a system which will train in 
hand work and which will not assume to train captains but work- 
men; a system which will permit no short cuts to the position of 
master workman, but will fit for that of journeyman in shorter time ; 
a system which will stand fair between every interest of all the 
people ; a system which will do definite things and open the door of 
opportunity to a multitude against whom it is now closed; and a 
system which will dignify hand labor and go a long way to restore 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I5I 

the balance that we have been losing, to the diminution of our 
efficiency and therefore of our happiness at home, as well as to the 
injury of our trade relations with the other nations of the world. 

Of course the people whose feelings are expressed in this 
notable assemblage need no other argument than the exclusively 
moral one to quicken their interest in the conservation of American 
childhood. It has been the political assumption of the Republic 
that none other is necessary. But it must begin to be evident that 
even the economic interests of an empire, even the apprehensions 
and aspirations of the man on horseback, may go further than the 
moral sense of a democracy must necessarily go to make an ele- 
mental training of the children universal. Something beyond the 
open chance, and something beyond our encouragement and good 
wishes, will have to operate if we are to conserve the youth of the 
United States and steadily advance the efficiency, and therefore the 
character, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country. We 
shall have to have an always up-to-date enrolment of every child in 
the land, and some responsible central authority will have to see 
that every one gets that fundamental training in useful things, 
which, under the theories of all respectable governments, is his in 
his own right, and which the manifest interests of every country 
inexorably demand that he shall have. 

As already observed, when we really commence a good thing we 
do much of it. President Roosevelt is following his notable move- 
ment for conserving natural resources with another, which is to 
have the attention of a distinguished conference in Washington next 
week, in the interests of neglected and defective children. That is 
admirable. It will be one of the many good things which will make 
the administration of Roosevelt prominent in the history of the 
country. But we must go still further. We must take up the 
claims of the overwhelming number of children who are reasonably 
normal and not very destitute. We must conserve their time, their 
mental and manual efficiency, and their morals. We must have 
them all recorded, and see that every one has the benefit of his 
birthright. We must exercise more control. We must see that 
every one is trained to read and write, and prepared for some voca- 
tion by w^hich he can make a living. Then there will not be so 
many degenerates and waifs in the next generation or in the one 
after that. 

There seems to be little room for issues of fact or differences of 
opinion among us. In college vocabulary, we offer to all the people 



152 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

more wide-open electives in our educational system from top to 
bottom, and require less, than does any other country. They offer 
less and require more than we do. They certainly get more in a 
circumscribed but exact elementary training universally diffused 
than we do. We shall withdraw no offerings : we shall doubtless 
make more. But that is not enough. In the moral interests of 
boys and girls, in the interests of industrial prosperity, in the inter- 
ests of the Republic, and in the interests of democracy and freedom 
in the world, we are bound not only to see that every child can read 
and write, but to follow him until he has the chance to enter upon a 
vocation which will make him respectable and of worth to the world. 

In the advance of our educational system we have not maintained 
the balance. The unequal chance, the fallacious outlook, works in- 
justice to multitudes of people and to many industries. Our educa- 
tion should put a premium upon work of hand. It is the only way 
to enlarge the open chance without confusing and misleading boys 
and girls. 

We should all stand for laws establishing better and safer condi- 
tions for labor, and particularly for laws which try to keep greed 
from robbing children of their American birthright. But when we 
exclude children from work, we must include them in the schools. 
Too much work is bad, but too much idleness is infinitely worse. 
The schools are bound to be of a kind and character which will 
enable them to count organized labor among their strongest sup- 
ports. 

We are in the midst of a great task. We are working out the 
basis and the details of the greatest industrial democracy in human 
history. Let us lose nothing of our good humor. Let us abate 
nothing of our confidence and our courage. Let us prove that our 
indifference is more apparent than real. Let us tone down our con- 
ceits and our boasting. Let us cultivate toleration of opinion and be 
generous in our estimates. Let us think straight, with an open 
mind, expecting to give and take and come to common conclusions. 
Let us use our political power without fear, when with good pur- 
pose. Let us say nothing for mere novelty; nothing to catch the 
eye of a newspaper which scares itself for revenue only. Let us go 
on getting harder and stronger, exercising more and more control in 
the interests of decency and thrift, and making the forces of right- 
eousness more aggressive than the forces of evil dare to be. 

There is no need of misgivings. What is upon us was bound to 
come. We should have expected it, and we can handle it. When 



CONSERVING CHILDHOOD I53 

the moral sense of the nation is once stirred it acts quickly and 
forcefully. A democracy with the finest possibilities for every one 
is better than a monarchy which, in one way or another, keeps a 
whole people in bondage. Of course, there are difficulties. It is 
harder for a people to agree together and execute their purpose, 
than for a monarch or minister who reckons not with the popular 
mind to settle things. But even old Talleyrand declared that public 
opinion was mightier than any monarch who ever lived. We have 
broken out roads and we will break out more. We will consider 
until we conclude what ought to be done, and then we shall not be 
so squeamish about vesting executive officers with the power to carry 
it out. Our plan of government has already justified its being. It 
will do so more completely. And when it has solved our problems 
upon a basis of reason and of right, as it will, the people will be the 
happier and the State the stronger, because in our education we shall 
be better balanced, in our industries we shall be more efficient, and 
in our politics and our religion we shall be more free. 



LINCOLN CENTENARY 



ABRAHAM LINCOLN 

\P man has expressed the feelings cf America so well as President 
Lincoln; and no man in this or any other land has been more 
truly great. He was the child of poor parents. He was born in a 
log cabin. He went to school but little because he lived where there 
were no schools. When a boy and young man he worked hard with 
his hands and it gave him a healthy body. He studied a few good 
books and it gave him a clear head. He liked history. He mastered 
mathematics and did surveying. He was interested in politics, and 
his mind grasped the laws easily. He read about the principles of 
government, and thought about the rights of men. He became a 
lawyer. He was elected to the Legislature of Illinois, and then to the 
Congress of the United States. The experiences thus gained helped 
to make him a successful lawyer. He was much interested in the 
affairs of the people, in universal justice, and in the good of his country. 
He thought for himself, and he thought hard and straight. He had a 
keen sense of humor and a fine gift of wit. He wrote so plainly, and 
he spoke in public so clearly, that all the people could understand him. 
But he had even greater qualities. His habits were simple and he lived 
without great show. He was true and sincere, and the people believed 
in him. All these things made him a leader, a statesman, and a very 
great man. The country was deeply agitated about slavery. It had 
existed in all of the states in earlier years ; and it then existed in all of 
the Southern States, where there were five millions of slaves. He 
abhorred human bondage, but he abhorred war also. The laws allowed 

From the Lincoln Centenary pamphlet, issued by the State Education 
Department, for February 12, 1909 

156 



slavery in the South, and he thought it impossible to change the laws 
and abolish slavery without bringing on a war between the Northern 
and the Southern States. He hoped for an easier and better way. 
But many tried to carry slavery into the new states and territories that 
were being formed beyond the Mississippi river. He was opposed to 
that, whether war came or not. He spoke hundreds of times against 
it, and what he said made him President of the United States. This 
brought on a dreadful war, which lasted four years. Great armies of 
citizens were organized to save the Union. Half a million of the best 
men in the country. North and South, lost their lives. There was 
sorrow in nearly every family, and distress in almost every home. In 
the midst of the war President Lincoln issued the Emancipation ProC' 
lamation, freeing all the slaves, it was the greatest act of a great and 
noble President, who was right in his reasoning, clear in his statements, 
courageous in his acts, and humane in his treatment of all upon whom 
the war brought misfortune. He thought little of himself. He wanted, 
above all things, to save t!ie Union. He was very happy when he 
came to believe that he could make the nation wholly free and 
save the Union at the same time. Guided by God, in whom he 
believed, he led the forces of Freedom and Union to a splendid national 
triumph ; and all, including the people of the South, are now glad of it. 
The abolition of slavery brought freedom to all who live under the flag 
of the Union, and opened the way for us to become a more united 
and a very much greater nation. Just as the war ended, when 
President Lincoln was fifty' six years old, he was assassinated, and all 
the people mourned as never before or since. His life was the best 
expression we have ever had of the humanity, the industry, the sense, 
the conscience, the freedom, the justice, the progress, the unity, and the 
destiny of the Nation. His memory is our best human inspiration. 

157 



WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 

^\DDRESS AT THE CELEBBIATION OF THE CENTENARY OF THE BIRTH OF 
ABRAHAM LINCOLN, HELD UNDER THE AUSPICES OF THE CITY OF 
NEW YORK, AT THE GREAT HALL OF THE COLLEGE OF THE CITY OF 
NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 12, I909 

From the close of the Revolution to the crisis of the Civil War 
slavery was the ever present obstacle to the union of the states. It 
was not a live questjion until union was possible and necessary. The 
mother country had approved slavery, and all the colonies had par- 
ticipated in it. It had vanished in the North because not right and 
not profitable, and it had become established in the South because 
all the conditions favored it and the moral sense did not disapprove 
it. The South was rich in property and weak in numbers, and the 
North was strong in people and poor in pocket. And the South 
was not lacking in moral sensibilities. Society was quite as highly 
developed and religion quite as much a force in the Carolinas as in 
New England. All the colonies had planned and fought together 
for independence, and all had done much that was vital for the 
Union. But slavery obstructed the formation of a Union that 
could live ; it menaced the constitutional convention almost to the 
point of dissolution ; it threatened to destroy the Union after it had 
been created. 

The " more perfect union " was the result of a necessity that was 
absolute. The constitution was the splendid creation of educated 
and sagacious statesmanship, of superior patriotism, and of proper 
concessions to situations and opinions. In all this the North and 
the South had equal share. The recognition of slavery and the ex- 
press protection of the foreign slave trade for twenty years was the 
heavy price which had to be paid for the constitution itself. Heavy 
as it was, it was well to pay it, and there is no ground for recrimina- 
tion about it now. All the states agreed to the rendition of slaves, 
to the counting of slaves on the basis of representation, and to a 
tax upon slaves imported. For the protection of the slave trade, 
New Hampshire, Massachusetts, and Connecticut voted with Mary- 
land, the two Carolinas, and Georgia, while Virginia voted against 
it. The lives of states, like the lives of men, have their inconsis- 
tencies. When the adoption of the constitution had been wrested 
from reluctant states, the bondage of men and women, within cir- 
cumscribed limits, became legalized in the Republic which was being 
dedicated to the principle that all men stand equal before the law. 

[158] 



WHAT AIAKES UNCOLN GREAT I59 

Then commenced the long and acrimonious struggle for the ad- 
mission of slavery into common territory and into new states. Com- 
munication was slow and contacts were few. The sections came 
together but little, either directly or through the press. There were 
large accessions of territory and other great states were coming 
into view. Washington was the arena in which freedom and 
slavery battled for their own. Learning and oratory were the in- 
struments of each. But slavery was more aggressive because the 
more directly concerned. War was frequently threatened, and once 
employed. The Union was at all times in danger. Compromise 
followed compromise. From each conflict slavery emerged with 
the advantage upon her side. At the turning point of the last cen- 
tury the hope of the makers of the constitution had not been real- 
ized. Freedom was more crippled and humiliated ; slavery was 
more aggressive and defiant. The nation was not becoming wholly 
free. It was apparently becoming wholly slave. 

The constitution prohibited Congress from legislating against the 
slave trade until 1808. In the next year, in a hovel in the Ken- 
tucky wilderness, a man child was born. It is lacking nothing in 
reverence to say that he was to be " a man of sorrows and ac- 
quainted with grief," or that he was to " deliver his people from an 
overwhelming sin." He came to his full stature at the turning 
point of the century, just as the freedom of his country stood most 
vitally in need of a prophet and a knight. 

Abraham Lincoln was surely a child of those whom, with apt 
discrimination, he called the " plain people." The study of his 
genealog\' may fascinate students, but his ancestry is not material to 
his memory. His forefathers are interesting to us because he is in- 
teresting to us, but they can neither help nor harm his fame. The 
little child who appeared in the log cabin a hundred years ago, was 
fifty-six years later carried to his burial amid profound and uni- 
versal mourning. That is the ground of his rights to greatness in 
America. His life was great. He had a noble mission in the world 
and nobly he fulfilled it. It was but well begun when death over- 
took him. His memory looms greater with every passing year. 
His life was the finest expression we have of the best attributes of 
American character, and his memory is our highest inspiration to be 
plain, sane, true, tolerant, patient, aggressive, and hopeful, as a 
nation. 

In preeminent degree he was the embodiment of the homely 
virtues. He lived plainly and soberly. He refused to overreach 
and he met all of his personal obligations. He was a good neighbor 



l6o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

and a firm friend. He discouraged unprofitable controversy. He 
tried his lawsuits without embittering his adversaries. He helped 
the ward, the town, the county, and the state, in which he lived. 
He had wit and humor. He could tell an apt story and make a good 
speech. Admirable as these qualities were, they were in themselves 
only enough to save him from mediocrity and lift him into re- 
spectability. Genius may win fame without them. Though noble 
and perhaps necessary contributions to real greatness, other qualities 
must supplement the common virtues before greatness is attained. 

n Lincoln had not an orderly and legal mind by nature, it was 
early and easily made so by youthful study of a few of the books 
which could give it texture and vitality. The mathematics which he 
loved made it click with exactness. He laid a boy's firm grasp 
upon the fundamentals of the law — its history, its philosophy, its 
spirit, its purposes, and its methods. Decisions were only incidents. 
He reasoned from the groundwork of society up to the matter in 
hand. His purposes were sound and his logic inexorable. He was 
successful. He tried more cases at the Circuit, and argued more 
appeals in the Supreme Court, than any other man in Illinois, This 
contributed to, but it did not reach the height of his greatness. 

Much, but not too much, has been made of his activity in politics. 
He looked after the political organization. He saw to it that the 
delegates were to his liking. He did much thinking for the con- 
ventions. He husbanded the patronage and used it. He joined 
issues and wrote platforms. He led his party, and laid intellectual 
pitfalls and political ambushes for his adversaries. He was often a 
candidate for ofiice, was often chosen, and often beaten. He spent 
weeks and months together " preaching the gospel " and " cultivat- 
ing the vineyard " from Galena to Cairo. But he derived no com- 
mercial profit from politics. Rather, he contributed much more 
than his share. He was always poor. Frequently he left politics 
and returned to the law to earn a living. He never seems to us — 
nor was he, in fact — a mere office seeker. He never depended 
upon place. He never dissipated in politics. He was in public life 
for a purpose. He absolved himself from all political activity for 
years together when he saw no principles at stake, nor new ground 
to be gained. He cared nothing for ward, city, or county places. 
Statecraft fascinated him. He thought deeply. He had a sur- 
prisingly clear outlook. He was concerned about the rights of men 
and about a government that could endure. He knew the people, 
for he was one of them ; and he spoke so plainly and convincingly 
that he gained a following. We now know that he had become a 



WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT l6l 

Statesman, and we now see that his poHtics was but a mere incident 
to his statesmanship. Some of the elements of his real greatness 
began to appear, as his activity in politics was an accessory to it ; 
but rustling in politics was far, very far, from the summit of it. 

It is not to be denied that he was fortunate in his opportunity. 
Manifestly he did not think so. Few other men would have thought 
so. The man who thought only of that at the time would have 
missed the opportunity. But looking backward we see it. Stephen 
A. Douglas was a great man. History will not deny his patriotism 
or his statesmanship. He was the foremost political orator of his 
time, until he met Lincoln in joint debate. If he then ceased to be, 
it was because Lincoln had the qualities which could make the most 
of his freer opportunities and the better cause. Douglas was not 
only a senatorial star of the first magnitude, but he was unques- 
tionably the recognized leader of the great political party which had 
been dominant in the country since that fateful morning when, at 
the break of day, Adams started off for Massachusetts in a pet 
which refused to let him induct Jefferson into the great office for 
which the senator was supremely ambitious and which it was the 
common expectation that he would reach. Illinois was a democratic 
state. Illinois was the political " borough " of Douglas, and political 
arts had been employed to set the lines so that he could hold it 
against any popular majority which a passing storm might throw up 
against him. To contest the political position, and the very political 
life, of Senator Douglas, among a people who had long considered 
him their greatest man, could not have seemed an enviable oppor- 
tunity to Lincoln. 

But something beyond our ken rules great events, and that some- 
thing, without his knowing it, made it Lincoln's opportunity. The 
repeal of the " Compromises " opened up the slavery question anew 
and with unprecedented fury. More than once Lincoln had shown his 
independence of party in the interest of the freedom of black men, 
but his veneration for the constitution and the laws kept him from 
abolitionism. Abhorring slavery with all his great soul, he ab- 
horred war also. He knew, above almost every other man, that 
slavery was intrenched in law ; that an invasion of territory or a 
violation of the compacts of the constitution, to free the slaves, 
would force a war which might not remove the evil, and which 
might sever the union of the states and obstruct the advance o£ 
democracy in the world. He grasped a vain hope in the unex- 
pected. Before the extreme of overt war, slavery might be rooted 
out by a tidal wave of feeling, or restricted by negotiation. The 



l62 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

slaves might 1)6 paid for by the government and set free. And if 
war were to come, there was nothing more important than that it 
should not come before the nation could sustain it, and that even 
then it should be a war of the slave power against the Union, 
rather than a war of freedom against an institution which was 
sanctioned by long usage and supported by the fundamental law. 

The people were dazed by the menace of a cataclysm. Parties 
were disintegrating and a new alignment was at hand. The Whig 
party was at an end. The Democratic party was dividing; the 
Democratic national leader and the Democratic president had 
parted company. The Republican party was beginning to show 
some coherency, but was without aggressive organization. Some 
of the men who were yet to lead it were playing small politics with 
one faction or the other of the opposition. At this juncture Senator 
Douglas devised the doctrine that the new states should settle the 
slavery question for themselves ; that it should be held to be a local 
and not a national question ; that each state should vote slavery up 
or down as the majority saw fit. It was a specious doctrine, 
and upon it the great r-enator went back to Illinois to seek a re- 
election to the Senate. 

Lincoln joined the issue. A voice that was familiar to Illinois 
now began to be heard by the nation. It was heard because it had 
something to say, and because Senator Douglas was obliged to reply 
to it. It said that a house divided against itself could not stand; 
that the nation would become all slave or all free; that whereas 
there had been reason to expect it would become all free, there was 
now extreme danger that it would become all slave ; that the natural 
state of the country was one of freedom ; that if there were reasons 
why slavery should be endured in old slave territory, there was no 
reason why it should be allowed to come into territory already and 
inherently free; that slavery was a moral wrong and no majority 
could make it right; and that the power to vote the slave system 
into free territory was never to be upheld and never to be conferred 
by a free people. 

It was the greatest political debate in our history. It was carried 
to every part of the state. It raged from July to November. 
There were hundreds of meetings, and seven of them in representa- 
tive centers of the state were joint, and attended by vast multitudes. 
At the onset the senator alluded to his adversary as a " kind, 
amiable, intelligent gentleman," but such patronizing pleasantry soon 
ceased, for ample cause. There was much sparring for position, 



WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 163 

great parades and much noise and clatter, plenty of humor and 
assumed politeness, no dearth of invective, and no lack of serious- 
ness and ardor. Lincoln was a lance so free that not even his 
friends could limit or direct him, and very often his thrusts reached 
a vital part. If he had the stronger moral argument, he was no less 
equipped in legal learning, and he kept the better natured. Without 
apparent thought of self, he did a master's work upon the ship of 
state. When the election came, the Legislature was with Douglas, 
but the popular majority was with Lincoln. He had, fortunately, 
lost the senatorship ; tout he had come to be the available candidate 
of a rapidly consolidating party for the presidency. And he had 
shown the intellectual virility and the moral courage which did so 
much to make him great. 

The election of Lincoln made war inevitable. He knew this bet- 
ter than any other man in the country. The men of the .South ex- 
pected secession, because they anticipated Lincoln's election and 
quickly realized the meaning of it. Before the election was held 
they began to assemble the machinery of separation and inde- 
pendence, and the moment the result was reached they started it 
with all celerity. Before the inauguration, seven states had 
formally assumed to go out of the Union. Their natural rectitude, 
their consistent thinking, and their pride, left no other course open 
to the statesmen of the South. But they had no reason to count 
upon a sanguinary war. They had reason enough to think that the 
North would not accept the gauge of battle. Some of the strongest 
friends of freedom and union were advising that they be allowed to 
depart in peace. In the election the North had spoken, but the 
South did not know the North, and the South looked upon Lincoln 
as a mere lawyer and politician. No better did the North know 
the South. Nor did the North know itself. Neither realized the 
conscientiousness, the caliber, or the heroism of the other. Indeed, 
neither knew the fighting qualities that were within itself. When 
the dogs of war were once let loose all the packs were eager 
enough, but before the chase was really on neither side knew 
its own strength, and each underestimated the resources and 
the spirit of the other. No one. North or South, unless it were 
Lincoln, suspected that such a war was close at hand. 

But Lincoln knew both peoples — the people of the North and the 
people of the South — as well as did any living man. By birth and 
knowledge of the situations and temperament of the people of the 
South, he was almost as much a southern man as the President of 



164 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

the Southern Confederacy himself. When war came his family- 
relatives and friends were in both armies. He was at the center of 
information, and a keen student of the rights, the logic, and the ad- 
vantages of situations. He knew also about the things in the con- 
stitution which protected slavery in the slave states. He knew about 
all the other things in the constitution. He regarded all parts of 
the constitution. He understood, moreover, the powers and the 
responsibilities of the presidential office. He knew the sacred char- 
acter of the Union. He believed there could be no union with 
slavery. He believed there could be no liberty without union. It 
was not more a matter of opinion than of fervor ; not so much a 
matter of policy as of conscience. He knew the terms of the oath 
he was to take. That oath was as inviolable as the Bible upon 
which it was taken. That constitution and that oath meant that 
the government revenues were to ibe collected in every port, and 
the government mails were to go unhindered upon every highway. 
The rights of men, the legal system, the temples of freedom, estab- 
lished by the armies of Washington, were to be upheld. Nothing 
but the inability to maintain the Union by supreme physical effort 
could determine that the Union was without the power to maintain 
itself. Of all men, Lincoln knew that war was at hand. His 
knowledge of the fact and the reasons which made the fact 
inevitable were among the elements which made him great. 

It was a serious, weird, prophetic figure that moved slowly out of 
the pioneer West to the helm of state. He spoke many times, but 
he said he was not ready to speak : he declared that he was anxious 
to hear, but that when the time came he would speak with no un- 
certain sound. He did so speak. He spoke in an English style so 
pure that it has become distinctive v^^herever English is upon the 
tongues of men. He spoke in sorrow and with affection. He spoke 
with all caution and yet with all distinctness. He left no room for 
doubt. He put the burden of the war upon those who in unhappy 
passion would paralyze the laws and sever the Union. Arguing that 
" no state upon its own mere motion can lawfully get out of the 
Union," and that " resolves or ordinances to that effect are legally 
void; and acts of violence against the authority of the United States 
are insurrectionary or revolutionary," he declared with all solemnity 
that he would execute the laws ; that there need be no bloodshed and 
would be none unless forced upon the national authority; and just 
as the last moment came he took the inaugural address upon his 



WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 1 65 

knee, and in genuine affection added, " In your hands, my dis- 
satisfied fellow-countrymen, and not in mine, is tiie momentous issue 
of civil war. The government will not assail you. You have no 
oath registered in Heaven to destroy it, while I shall have a solemn 
one to protect, preserve, and defend it." But there was no other 
way. War had to be. Nothing less than the magnificent repulse 
of the heroic charge of Pickett's division at Gettysburg could settle 
the question. 

Lincoln could lay the field of diplomacy and arrange the plan of 
war, as well as the groundwork of legal or political discussion. 
Much more, this sagacious and gentle knight of the forum and the 
hustings proved at once that he could be the very reservoir of 
power, the very genius of administration, the very incarnation of 
war. Without much reverence for form, without any false worship 
of precedent, he used practical ways to accomplish practical ends. 
Quickly he rose above the commonplace. He would attend to little 
things when beseeched, but his mind sought the great things. 
There were great men in Congress, but he led them. There were 
very great men, who were very unlike, in the Cabinet, but he domi- 
nated their every important act. He hesitated not a moment in de- 
termining the foreign relations of the government. But of course 
the vital concerns were at his hand. He coaxed and coerced and 
held the states that were upon the border line of conflict. He was 
always kind and always stern. The sufferings of a soldier, or the 
grief of a woman unnerved him, but he lacked nothing in steadiness 
or strength when it came to using the resources of the country for 
the saving of the Union. With a great heart which brooded over 
the agonies of conflict, he gathered all the forces and sharpened all 
the instruments of war. He knew the temper of soldiers who were 
American freemen. He was impatient at inaction. He lost no 
opportunity to aid a private soldier or inspire an army. He gave all 
the credit and the glory to a general who won victories, and he 
visited his grieved and stinging censure upon one who refused the 
opportunity of battle after a success in the fear of loss of personal 
and professional prestige. He would hold a general's horse, or re- 
move him from co'mmand, if he thought that the one thing or the 
other would bring another victory. When success came, he made 
it the base of broader undertakings which could not be attempted 
without it. H disaster overtook the Union arms, as it often did, he 
stood with bowed head and bleeding heart, but still dauntless, in its 
awful presence. He effaced himself completely and. partizan 



1 66 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

though he was, he rose above all partizanship. He proposed to 
give over his place to the political opposition if that would more 
completely unify the North, but when it would not, and he had to 
fight for reelection, he did it with his old-time sagacity. The result 
proved that he above any other could unify the North. And the 
consolidating sentiment of the North carried the awful struggle to 
its consummation. Manassas, Antietam, Shiloh, Chickamauga, 
Vicksburg, Fredericksburg, Chancellorsville, the Wilderness, are 
some of the names that exemplify the vicissitudes of the long 
struggle and express the gallantry of Americans, North and South. 
When the white light of peace broke at Appomattox it lighted a 
Union that would need time for convalescence, but was free enough 
to live: and the lifting clouds revealed something of the enduring 
proportions of Lincoln. 

War changed the legal status of slavery. States could not both 
repudiate and invoke the constitution. The slave system could not 
claim protection from a government whose very life it was seeking 
to undo. Property is the lawful prize of war. It is singularly so 
when the property is in slaves who are made to add human energy 
to the inert forces of war. The first flash at Sumter changed the 
legal situation. Accommodation was possible no longer. Slavery 
or the Union was to die. New laws were to come right speedily. 
The goddess of justice, which had always protected the master, 
made ready to help the slave. If the Union were to live, the falling 
of the sword which would shatter the shackles and set men and 
women free had come to be a question of strength and of events. 
Happily, the man who had so fondly wished that " all men every- 
where might be free " was to determine when the powers of the 
commander in chief, and the physical strength of the army and 
navy of the United States, made it both possible and expedient to 
set men free. 

Patriots and moralists could see no room for hesitation. The 
North ivas divided. The war drew heavily upon its resources. 
There was mourning in every home. The result was far from certain. 
Success depended upon sentiment. The border states were always in 
the balance. With those who urged the moral rights of man were 
the many who insisted that the President should find express au- 
thority for all he did in the constitution and the laws which had 
never anticipated such a crisis, and those others in overwhelming 
numbers who demanded that a war for the Union should never be 
changed into a war for abolition. Old friends left him. The blind- 



WHAT MAKES LINCOLN GREAT 167 

ing storm raged all about him, and the rolling waves of bitterness 
and abuse broke at his very feet. With the proclamation in his 
own handwriting in his private desk, known to none but himself and 
his God, he was the fortress of the situation. " What I do or 
leave undone about slavery, I do or I abstain from doing to save the 
Union." The Union was the only temple upon which Liberty could 
rest her foot. In his waiting, as in his doing, he exemplified the 
qualities which make him great. 

The supreme satisfaction in Lincoln's life must have come when 
he could believe that emancipation would give added strength to 
the armies and help save the Union. None knew better than he 
that it meant more to the white man than to the black. If it gave 
the one his chance, it saved the other from his sin. If it freed a 
race, it freed a nation also. If it gave a race its physical freedom, it 
gave the nation its moral opportunity. It made possible such a 
unity of the Republic as had never been, and it opened the way 
for an outworking of democracy in industry, in politics, in educa- 
tion, and in religion, which is the marvel of the world, and which 
projects its light and its power into the obscure recesses of the 
coming ages. 

It would be a frightful perversion of this Imndredth anniversary 
of the birth of Abraham Lincoln if a word should ibe spoken which 
is out of key with the spirit of the man. In the very midst of war 
he had no words but those of considerateness and kindness for the 
people of the South. Only two months before he died he tried 
without avail to convert his Cabinet to compensation for the slaves. 
In his great second inaugural he declared the national, rather than 
the sectional, responsibility for slavery. A week before he died 
he walked up the streets of Richmond with " Tad's " hand in his, 
and went around the block to call at the home of General Pickett, 
who led the awful charge at Gettysburg. Mrs Pickett opened the 
door, with a baby in her arms. " I am Abraham Lincoln," he 
said. " Oh ! you are the President," the surprised woman an- 
swered. " No, I am George Pickett's old friend from Illinois." 
Then he took the baby in his arms and kissed it. This restored 
the L'f^nion at one point at least. He expressly informed the War 
Department and the generals in the field that they must not assume 
to settle any political questions. He was, and he intended to be, 
the best friend the South could have, and its overwhelming mis- 
fortune came in his melancholy death. Yet we must not dare to 
forget that more than generosity was in his soul. Justice, as well 



l68 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

as gentleness ; sternness, as well as magnanimity ; " faith in the 
right," as well as " charity for all " ; greatness, as well as generosity, 
were all his. The occasions determined the applications. Through 
it all, he left no rough word and no mean act to degrade the great 
things he did. In what he said, in what he did, in what he fore- 
bore, appear the qualities which make him great. 

Forty- four years have come and gone since Lincoln died. There 
were great men and -great leaders before him, and there have been 
great men and great leaders since him. Another generation is here. 
It is a free and a discriminating generation. It ranks him above 
all others. He is one of us, the child of American opportunity. 
He has given the truest ring and the sweetest harmony to the spirit 
of his country. No man, no combination of men, could change 
it: the spirit of the nation is attuned to the spirit of Lincoln, and 
so it will remain forever. That is the overwhelming thing which 
makes Lincoln great. 

There is one star in the heavens which men know before all the 
other stars. Taken by itself alone, it is an ordinary star among 
the stars. It is not of the first magnitude : yet it is in good com- 
pany. It is one of a brilliant constellation which always attracts 
the eye. It has supreme importance in itself, for it is so near the 
polar axis of the earth that the world and all the stars seem to 
swing around it. It is always in sight in the United States. Its 
fixedness and stability make it the guide and the helper of prac- 
tical men. The magnetic needles point to it. On land or sea, the 
traveler looks to it and feels sure upon his course. What the north 
star is to the natural life of the world, Lincoln is to the political 
science of the Republic and the moral sense of men. 

Do any of us think that it was a matter of chance? Then we 
think that day and night, the rains and the dew, the winds and the 
tides, the fertility of the earth, the crops in their seasons, the colors 
and the fragrance of the flovv^ers, magnetism and electricity, the 
sun and the stars, are matters of chance. 

It was in the divine plan, and not the mere accident of chance. 
The God who put the north star in the heavens made Lincoln. The 
God of the Bible and of the creation, the God of the Hebrew 
prophets and of the Christians, the God of the unfolding centuries, 
the God who has helped freedom in all ages and in all lands, the 
God who gave wisdom to the men of the Constitutional Convention 
and victory to the arms of the Union at Gettysburg — He made 
Lincoln great. And in the plentitude of His powers, and in the 
outworking of His plans, He makes Lincoln greater and greater, 
year by year. 



THE MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL 

CAREER 

ADDRESS AT THE SERVICE HELD IN OBSERVANCE OF THE lOOTH ANNI- 
VERSARY OF THE BIRTH OF ABRAHAM LINCOLN, AT THE FIRST 
PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, ALBANY, N. Y., SUNDAY EVENING, FEB- 
RUARY 14, 1909 

Next Friday it will be eight and forty years since Abraham Lin- 
coln was the guest of this State and of this city. He was the presi- 
dent elect. He was on a journey which has become historic. He 
was going to a place which was already great, but which he was 
to make very much greater in human history. The schools were 
closed, and I saw him emerge from the train where the railroad 
crosses north Broadway, kept abreast of his carriage upon the slow 
march down Broadway and up State street to the old Capitol, and 
heard his brief address from the porch, beyond which boys of 
twelve, who were without influence, very properly were not allowed 
to go. 

His was an unusual figure. His extreme height was accentuated 
by his leanness and by a silk hat which was tall and straight like its 
owner. Yet there was nothing odd, nothing amusing, nothing un- 
gainly, in the appearance of the man. He was the child of western 
pioneers, and a pioneer of pioneers himself, but in figure, face and 
dress he would have looked very much at home in a Congregational 
cnurcL in New England. He was sinewy, strong, and stalwart — 
the figure of an athlete, for an artist. He could take an axe by 
the end of the helve and hold it straight, with his arm upon a line 
with his shoulder. In the state convention which determined to 
present him for the presidency, some enthusiasts from his early 
country home brought in some walnut rails which they said he 
had split, and the convention undertook to have him say whether 
or not that were so. He answered that there was no way of iden- 
tifying those particular rails, but he could say in truth that he had 
split a great many that were just as good. He was always at his 
ease on horseback. Coming up our Capitol hill over the cobble- 
stone pavement, he stood erect, true, and imposing in his jolting 
carriage, and removed his tall hat to the cheering crowds upon 
either side, with a grace that was a part of the absolute naturalness 
and genuineness of the man. Too much has been said about his 
awkwardness and his forbidding dress. There was no more sham- 

[169] 



170 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

ble in his gait than in his mind or in his morals. He sometimes 
wore a shawl, but the shawl was an article of men's street apparel 
in his day. His dress was as unconventional as the man was 
original and independent. But there was nothing- extreme, cer- 
tainly nothing freakish, about it all. The physical man, and his 
dress, and his stalwart character, and his sane and independent 
thinking went together, and together they fitted into the body of 
the people of whom he was one, while they seemed appropriate 
enough to the great station which he was called upon to fill. 

He was then fifty-two years old. He was born in a cabin in the 
western wilderness, of a father who never succeeded, and of a 
mother who had some of the blood and many of the traits of gentle- 
ness. He has said that his childhood could all be expressed by the 
one line in Grey's Elegy which speaks of " The short and simple 
annals of the poor." In youth he was accustomed to severe labor 
of the hand. He worked in a store and became a leader in the 
badinage of the neighborhood. At odd moments he read the Bible 
and Shakespeare many times, and studied Euclid until he had 
mastered the demonstrations. He became fascinated with the 
structure of society and with the sources, the forces, the history, 
the philosophy, and the applications of the law. He had enough to 
say. He developed a pure, a distinct, and now a well known 
English style in which to say it. He wrote with all clearness. He 
spoke with great distinctness. He came to be the foremost lawyer 
in his state. He came to make as well as to interpret and apply the 
law. Politics went with the law, and he attracted, managed, and 
marshaled men. With on-rushing events he became the great war- 
president of the United States, the great emancipator of the Ameri- 
can Republic. 

We have no need to dwell upon the external or physical character- 
istics of this man, for we all know them by heart. But we may 
well reflect upon the more striking advances of the steadily unfold- 
ing moral character which was the soul of Abraham Lincoln, and 
which gave initiative, direction, and always increasing power to all 
that he did. 

It is one of the elements of his greatness, and one of the satisfac- 
tions of his country, that he never lacked in moral character. From 
first to last he did nothing to bring shame, and said nothing to be 
taken back. To the conventional he seems unconventional. In 
childhood, in youth, in manhood, he lived upon the border line be- 
tween broken and unbroken territory. It is the compensation of 



MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER 171 

primitive life that it is broad and free. Lincoln was a veritable 
child of nature. He was a product of the wilderness, and of the 
prairie, and of society in its Hquid state. But he was the heir of 
the opportunities, as well as of the hindrances, of open situations. 
He knew both the external and the hidden life of a wondrous peo- 
ple. He was disposed to be like his people. He did not think there 
was anything very unusual about himself. He was not a radical. 
He was much censured for it. He was not a conservative. He 
was much censured for that. He aspired to be an ordinary leader 
of an ordinary people. He was a practical man of affairs and he 
used practical means to practical ends. He was part and parcel 
of the manner of life of his people. His ways were severely plain. 
He would change places with the humblest. He drew his illustra- 
tions from situations and incidents which all could understand. He 
would have seemed out of place, and perhaps occasions came 
when he did seem out of place, in the midst of a culture which 
some one has described as mere lassitude refined. But he was at 
home wherever there was virile thinking that bore upon the actuali- 
ties of life. If one knew him only superficially he might seem in- 
consistent. He was gentle and severe, kind and stern, cautious 
and aggressive, humorous and melancholy, modest and mighty. 
From first to last he effaced himself. Within the limitations of the 
law he venerated, he listened to the great heart which told him what 
to do. He gained the confidence of his people because, through a 
life that was full of menace, his personal morals remained un- 
scathed. Love of truth and of justice was the paramount quality in 
his character, from the wilderness in Kentucky to the presidency. 
He was always in a struggle, and the struggling gave him strength. 
Abuse, of which he received more than his share, disciplined but 
did not embitter him. He towered higher and higher because he 
attached no undue importance to individuals or to episodes ; because 
he broke through barriers and gained strength by it ; because he 
accomplished things, and mounted upon results to accomplish things 
that were higher than what had gone before. 

His nature was not merely moral. It was religious. His life 
was moved by something more than a mind which recognized the 
needs of sane and decent living, and the obligations of men to men. 
His was a nature which without ostentation expressed its religious 
feeling. He did not parade, but he did not hide, his feeling. God 
moved in the life of Lincoln. He did not suppress God in his 
nature, but made himself the instrument of God's freedom, oppor- 



172 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

tunity, and effectiveness. From first to last he spoke of this. He 
spoke of it more commonly to his close friends and in the writings 
which he did not expect the world to see. But he never withheld 
the expression when the situation made it seemly and the occasion 
was serious enough to keep it from being misunderstood. 

And with Lincoln religion was not an occasional sentiment. It 
was not an ecstatic state. It was not an empty form. It was not 
even a thing satisfied and concluded by membership in a Christian 
church. It was not alone a thing which made him a devoted hus- 
band, and a loving father, and an efficient townsman. It was God 
in a great mind and in an heroic man. It did not keep him from 
the affairs of men. It did not narrow him. It never made him ex- 
clusive. It did not close his eyes to the realities of life and the at- 
tributes of men. It plunged him into struggles. It kept him 
straight and gave him power in the Legislature, at the hustings, and 
upon the Illinois circuit. The outworking of it in the places which 
really try out the souls of men gave him the texture and the fiber 
and the superb moral and patriotic purpose which could rescue his 
country, and perhaps self-government in all countries, from what 
appeared to be insuperable obstacles and opposition. It is that out- 
working, and that alone, which, in a single generation, has taken 
Lincoln out of all partizanship and made him a proper theme for 
our reflections at the regular service of a Christian church. 

But all true men grow strong and great not by bounds, but by 
steps. They grow greater and greater by reason of the greater and 
greater things done. Let us find some of the particular steps, some 
of the things done, by which the moral nature of Lincoln grew to 
such heroic size and such splendid strength. 

The Illinois Legislature in 1837, following the ordinary thinking 
of the times, resolved that " the right of property in slaves is sacred 
to the slave-holding states." It was twenty-four years before the 
Civil War. It was a commonplace deduction from the federal Con- 
stitution and the laws of Congress and of the states, which was 
accepted by all save the few ultra and impractical people — the 
very salt of the earth — who were for abolition without regard for 
such human things as laws and constitutions. Lincoln, then a mem- 
ber of the State Legislature, was not an abolitionist. He knew 
about the legal basis and structure of society, and he venerated the 
Constitution and the laws. That makes it the nobler still that the 
mere boy of twenty-eight revolted. He opposed, but his opposition 
was unavailing. Ordinary men would not have felt called upon to 



MORAL ADN'ANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER 1 73 

go beyond the bounds of ordinary opposition. But despite his own 
estimate, he was not an ordinary man. He prepared his personal 
protest in writing, declared that " slavery is founded on both in- 
justice and bad policy," procured his colleague from Sangamon 
county, in which is the city of Springfield, to sign it with him, and 
required the House to express this protest upon its journal. It was 
heroic because it invaded a common usage and an accepted doctrine, 
and struck a note to which no party had dared listen, and at which 
no lawyer and no leader of opinion had dared strike. We now see 
what a significant step it was, and we ought to see how it aided 
harder and longer steps. 

With an always growing practice of the law, and an always en- 
larging leadership in politics, in ten years more Lincoln was a mem- 
ber of the thirtieth Congress. It embraced a galaxy of great 
men. Webster, Calhoun, Benton, Cass, Corwin, Collamer, Sam 
Houston, Simon Cameron. Robert C. Winthrop, Hannibal Hamlin, 
Horace Greeley, John A. Dix, Jefferson Davis, Alexander H. 
Stephens, Robert Toombs, and Andrew Johnson, were there. 
Stephen A. Douglas was promoted from the House to the Senate 
the day Lincoln entered the House. It was a congress of great 
events, as well as of great men. Liberty and slavery were in an 
evert and paroxysmal struggle. The only unholy war in our his- 
tory, that with Mexico for more slave territory, was on. 

Ordinary new memhers at thirty-eight would have been restrained 
in such a presence and in the midst of such events. But the pro- 
test in the Illinois Legislature made further protests easier. Lin- 
coln's conscience told him that it was an aggressive war of the 
slave power for more territory in the Southwest to offset the open- 
ing and enlarging free territory of the Northwest. The Presi- 
dent, who had permitted and helped the war, contended that Mexico 
had invaded our territory and shed our blood. In thirty days after 
entering the House, Lincoln broke through a line of great men and 
through forbidding situations, and offered carefully prepared reso- 
lutions in which it was demanded that the President indicate the 
spot within American territory where the first blood had been shed, 
and he addressed the House at length in support of his demand. 
Let us recall what the fledgling in Congress could say to the Presi- 
dent of the United States: " Let the President " he said, " answer 
the interrogatories I propose, fully, fairly, candidly, with facts and 
not with arguments. Let him remember that he sits where Wash- 
ington sat, and let him answer as Washington would answer. As 



1/4 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

a nation should not, and the Almighty will not, be evaded, so let 
him attempt no equivocation. If, so answering, he can show that 
the soil was ours where the first blood of the war was shed, I am 
with him for his justification." He always voted against the war, 
but as uniformly voted supplies to the army on the ground that 
the soldiers were not responsible and must be fed. His opponents 
in Illinois undertook to call him " Spot " Lincoln and charged him 
with disloyalty, for all this. He had to meet it many times in the 
debates with Senator Douglas. But conscience was becoming freer 
and the expression of it easier and stronger through its exercise 
in the face of opposition. 

Another advance was made through his resolutions in this Con- 
gress for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia. It 
is true he satisfied his lawyer mind by providing that it should be 
upon the majority vote of the District, and that owners should be 
paid for their slaves, but it gave fresh help to freedom and it went 
further in cheering Lincoln's sense of justice and his moral courage 
on their way. 

In another ten years we come to the greatest voluntary and moral 
advance in Lincoln's purely political career. They were years of 
events which would themselves seem very great but for the greater 
and nobler ones for which they were unexpectedly opening the way. 
The hope of the convention that formed the Constitution, that the 
nation would become wholly free, had proved vain. It was only 
too apparent that it was in peril of becoming wholly slave. Twice 
in these ten years Congress had swept away the most solemn com- 
pacts which established the bulwarks of at least a sectional free- 
dom. The Supreme Court had decided that slaves might be taken 
into the territories and yet held and trafficked in. Lincoln feared, 
with reason enough, that the court would go on and hold that 
slavery might, with only technical legal limitations, be carried into 
the free states. The spirit of slavery, rather than that of free- 
dom, was finding hospitality in the courts, and opportunity through 
the law. The machinery for apprehending and returning fugitive 
slaves had been made more and more drastic. Political parties had 
been avoiding exact issues, shuffling for votes, and dissolving into 
factions. Under such circumstances, in the early summer of 1858, 
Senator Douglas, the recognized leader of the dominant party in 
his state and in the nation, the readiest political orator of the 
decade, an undoubted patriot, the friend and rival of Lincoln for 
twenty-five years, went back to Illinois to prosecute a campaign 



MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN'S POLITICAL CAREER 175 

for re-election to the Senate upon a platform empowering the ter- 
ritories and the new states to have slavery or not as they should 
see fit. 

Lincoln more than challenged the proposition. He opened up 
the whole broad question. We had sought peace in compromise, 
and there was none. Understandings were not kept. The Consti- 
tution recognized slavery in the states where it was, and for the 
Sivke of the Union he would stand by the Constitution. But he 
insisted that slavery was inherently wrong, and that there was no 
moral right and no constitutional power to vote it into territory 
where it was not. " Senator Douglas is logical," he said, " if you 
do not admit that slavery is wrong. If you do admit that it is 
wrong, no one can logically say that he does not care whether it 
is voted up or voted down." That met the issue: but he went much 
further. Hope was breaking and extreme patience was wearing 
out; "A house divided against itself can not stand. This govern- 
ment can not permanently endure half slave and half free. I do 
not expect the Union to be dissolved. I do not expect the house 
to fall. I do expect it will cease to be divided. It will become all 
one thing or all the other." 

Illinois was the best example among the states of a house divided 
against itself. In sentiment and sympathy, if not in legal structure, 
it was half slave and half free. The northern boundary is in the 
latitude of Albany. The southern point is four hundred miles 
away, in the latitude of Richmond. The northern half was set- 
tled by people from New York and New England: the southern 
half by people from Virginia and Kentucky. He had good reason 
to understand the irrepressibility of the conflict of opinion. He 
was the first man of recognized attainments who was the acknowl- 
edged leader of a party to be reckoned wath, who had the moral 
courage to present an exact issue and stand for an exact result. 

He was not an abolitionist. He would leave slavery where it 
was, rather than invoke war. He cared nothing about social 
equality; that was a matter aside from the real question and apart 
from the law. He venerated the Union. It was the very ark of 
liberty in America and the hope of real liberty in all the world. He 
knew what it had cost ; he understood its legal basis and framework 
perfectly ; he knew what it was worth. He had made friends with 
Webster in Congress, had been at his table many times, and was his 
ardent disciple. He was for " Liberty and union." There was 
peril in any separation of the one from the other. He bound them 



1/6 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

together as Webster did, and made them his watchwords. It had 
been manifest enough that without union Hberty could not be. It 
had now become manifest to him that without Hberty union could 
not be. He abhorred war, and he would not afford a ground for 
Vv^ar which was repugnant to the Constitution. But he would say 
definitely that slavery should go no further, and then " rest in 
the belief that it was in the course of ultimate extinction." If this 
could not be, he expected it to " become alike lawful in all the states, 
old as well as new, north as well as south." Then all liberty would 
be gone, for slavery fetters the master quite as much as the slave. 

In the midst of this memorable discussion, Lincoln took one 
very distinct attitude upon an all-important subject, which strikingly 
illustrates his legal learning, his familiarity with history, and his 
moral courage. It concerned the authority and the right of the 
people to change the Supreme Court, as well as the statute law, 
when the court persisted in construing the laws so as to vitalize 
political policies with which the majority had come to be funda- 
mentally at variance. Without questioning the learning or the 
motives of the court he boldly charged that political feeling was hav- 
ing its expression through the decisions of the court. He unhesi- 
tatingly denied any ultimate obligations of the people to be bound by 
decisions of the courts upon questions of political opinion and 
policy. He would obey the determination, for he was against chaos 
and revolution, but he would hesitate not at all in seeking new laws 
or a new court, to the end that courts might express progress as 
well as precedents, and that liberty rather than slavery might have 
its opportunity. He called Jefferson and Jackson to the support of 
his contention, and he convincingly exemplified the attitudes of 
many leading men of all parties. Of course, he was charged with 
an assault upon the Supreme Court, but the immediate result 
marked another decisive moral advance in his political career, which 
perhaps gave him the courage to reassert the proposition in his first 
inaugural, with an ultimate result which appeared in new laws and 
a new court. 

From first to last in all this, Lincoln had acted practically or 
completely alone. He had gone forward without support from out 
of the state, and in spite of the protests of his close friends within 
the state. Indeed, the support of the weightiest influences in his 
party in the nation was given to his great rival to widen the breach 
in the opposition party ; and his intimate associates within the state, 
who were of a caliber second only to his own, followed him with 



MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN S POLITICAL CAREER 1 77 

hesitancy and apprehension. With devotion to the equaHty before 
the law which in the great fundamental of our political system, 
with entire self-effacement, with faith in his own opinions, with 
absolute freedom of movement, and with undoubting confidence in 
the people, he opened a new chapter in the political history of his 
country. Senator Douglas won reelection in the Legislature, but 
the popular sentiment and decisive majority supported the con- 
tentions of Mr Lincoln. Freedom had the moral victory. That 
gave a new and decisive turn to the course of politics in the country, 
for it showed discerning leaders whither they must lead unless they 
were disposed to lose. And it made him the presidential nominee, 
and in due course the president elect. 

The point tonight is the influence of it all upon the man. He 
hardly seemed the same after this. Happily he never lost his 
humor, but he jested less. He grew in seriousness. He abated not 
in plainness, but he grew more rugged. He lost nothing of his gen- 
tleness and helpfulness, but there was a new reserve in what he 
said. His practical sagacity never lessened, but his always deepen- 
ing purposes and his steadily enlarging responsibility kept him more 
surely in the very middle of the way. At once he became a 
national figure, but a national figure was not known to the people 
then as now. Before the result in Illinois he was suggested for the 
presidential nomination by the more discerning, and with that re- 
sult the question was more nearly settled than the mere politicians 
knew. He carried himself to the political culmination with steadi- 
ness and firmness. He said nothing to embitter. His lank figure 
and lean face grew in attractiveness. When it was settled that his 
course was to be the course of his country, he said what he could 
to conciliate the opposition, both north and south, but again and 
again he took precautions to make sure that nothing which had been 
gained should be lost in weakness or traded away for any temporary 
political end. 

With the departure from Springfield for Washington there was a 
yet more frequently expressed confidence in the people, and a yet 
more freely avowed dependence upon God. " I now leave, not 
knowing when or whether ever I shall return, with a task upon me 
greater than that which rested upon Washington. Without the 
assistance of that Divine Being who ever attended him, I can not 
succeed. With that assistance, I can not fail." All this became 
more and more pronounced through the presidential years. 



178 NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

We all know the full, fascinating, pathetic, heroic story of his 
presidency. It was a repetition, day by day, of joys and sorrows, of 
superb humility and of the fearless exercise of extraordinary 
powers, of dealings with a cabinet of great men who had nothing 
but patriotism in common with each other or with him, of efforts 
to get captains who could command, of apprehension, of victories 
and defeats, of deaths, of fast days, of deprivations and hardships, 
of more money and more men, of mitigating the misfortunes of 
war, of misunderstanding and abuse, of unyielding grip upon all the 
forces that could maintain the Union which he adored, and of 
undeviating plan to win the universal freedom which was his pas- 
sion. 

The presidential office is a great school for a great man. It is so 
at all times. It is even more truly so in war. War takes little 
notice of the law. In a crisis, monarchs ignore the regular order. 
But American freemen will not accept the ways of either m^onarchs 
or rulers. Happily, Lincoln was not of the stuff of which monarchs 
are made. He was the leader, not the ruler, of the people. He was 
the executive of a democracy, the expression of the physical, in- 
tellectual, and moral forces that were inherent in twenty millions 
of freemen. It was for him to make the precedents for the presi- 
dential office in a time of civil war. And the precedents which he 
established have become a priceless inheritance of the nation. 

Of course his supreme official responsibilities concerned the con- 
duct of the war and relations with foreign nations. History deals 
freely with the former, but for obvious reasons is rather reticent 
about the latter. There were idealists and hotheads who would 
have embroiled us in foreign wars, for there were foreign powers 
that would have looked with equanimity upon the dissolution of the 
Union and the failure of democracy. Lincoln had the responsibil- 
ity both of war and diplomacy, and hesitated at neither. Manage- 
ment served him with the English. He had to tolerate the 
antagonistic presence of the French in Mexico. Perhaps he held 
both in check through the definite and declared friendship of the 
Czar of all the Russias. With such things as mere interludes to 
the greater acts which bore upon conflicts in the field and upon the 
seas, and with the knowledge that he was only the executive of the 
will of a people, he bore as heavy burdens as ever tried out the 
soul of man. 

Other matters were perhaps quite as trying, though less import- 
ant, because more immediate and direct. Traders who wanted op- 



MORAL ADVANCES IN LINCOLN S POLITICAL CAREER 179 

portunities, sycophants who wanted jobs, captains who wanted to 
be colonels, committees of senators who wanted the cabinet changed, 
delegations who wanted generals removed, and doctrinaires who 
wanted to go through the lines to stop bloodshed by negotiations, 
thronged the White House day by day. 

Happily, there were some things which brought balm to the spirit. 
Conventions assured him that they trusted him. Men and women 
told him that they prayed for him. His " plain people " never de- 
serted him. Through all the grave vicissitudes of the situation, the 
great heart of the nation throbbed strong and true. 

And he did things to mitigate the misfortunes of war. In helping 
the worthy he soothed himself. 

In the hall of the White House he one day found a sick woman, 
with a baby in her arms, mourning to see her husband who was 
in the Army of the Potomac. He sent her to the hospital and 
telegraphed the general in command of the division to send that 
private soldier to Washington to see his wife. He closed his desk 
one afternoon and crossed the river to see an honest-hearted Ver- 
mont farmer boy under sentence of death for going to sleep upon 
a sentry's post. He talked to him as his father would, pardoned him, 
and gave him the opportunity to die honorably for his country upon 
the field of battle. Upon one of his visits to the hospitals his team 
came upon a mere boy, in the army blue, groping in the roadway. 
The coachman was annoyed, but the President left his carriage 
to find that a rifle shot had destroyed both of the soldier's eyes. 
He comforted the youth with the kindliness of greatness, and the 
next morning made him a lieutenant in the army and transferred 
him to the retired list, which provided for him for life. When a 
Washington newspaper that was his severe critic, spoke in com- 
mendation of Stonewall Jackson at the time of the melancholy 
death of that gallant Puritan captain of the Confederacy, Lincoln 
wrote a note to the editor and thanked him for it. He romped 
with his boys betimes. He defended the noise that they made, 
and protected their dogs and goats and ponies. When Willie died, 
he was close upon the brink. But the exigencies of state allowed 
little time for a father's grief. Listening to the people through 
the day, he did the work of the state until late into the night, often 
with the little boy who was left playing about his chair, and after 
the child would fall asleep upon the floor the weary father would 
work on until nature's protest had to be heeded, and then he would 
gather up the tired child and bear him to the bed they would occupy 
together. 



l8o NEW YORK STATE EDUCATION DEPARTMENT 

There were no vacations ; no going back to Illinois ; until the 
clouds broke and the final rest came. But duty, responsibility, 
greatness, never submerged the human interest that from first to 
last was in the man. Evenness, steadiness, durability, reliability 
in full measure, helpfulness for every proper end whether great or 
small, were all his, and they were given to his country in the hour 
of her need. 

It was a« spirit pure by nature and grown great by works, a spirit 
that had suffered inexpressibly but was capable of no resentment; 
it was the mighty leader of a grief -stricken but triumphant people, 
that spoke in the second inaugural. The words are as sacred as 
the scriptures, of which in part they are. Above all men, Lincoln 
then knew that peace was at hand, as well as he, of all men, knew, 
at the time his first inaugural was spoken, that war was at hand. 
In neither case could he say quite all he knew. If there is sorrow 
and pleading and firmness in the one case, there is poetry and 
prophecy in the other. With no note of exultation for the victors, 
with nothing that could touch the sensibilities of the vanquished, 
he says, " Let us judge not that we be not judged." " With malice 
toward none: with charity for all." There was no letting down 
because the culmination was in view. " With firmness in the right 
as God gives us to see the right." As peace was breaking, " Let it 
be a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." 

In a few weeks he had joined the world's immortals. With 
others I waited at the head of the broader 'State street at the hour 
of midnight as the cortege came up the street, and governors, sena- 
tors, and judges, and all the plain people removed their hats as eight 
sergeants of the army carried the body of Lincoln into the old 
Capitol. It was an impressive hour, deepened by the darkness, and 
the overhanging lights and the stars, and tremendously solemn by 
reason of the grief that filled all hearts. It was said that none 
would be admitted to the building before eight o'clock in the morn- 
ing. Then I would hold my place till eight o'clock. But at two 
o'clock the gates were opened and I passed by the coffin once, and 
then went around and passed again, to look a second time upon the 
face that had grown both gentler and stronger through the urgings 
of a pure and lofty purpose and under the discipline of overwhelm- 
ing events. He had passed through the wilderness and by the Red 
sea. Upon his soul and upon his face, God and country had done 
their perfect work. The moral advance had been unceasing, and he 
who had become one of the world's immortals had ripened for the 
immortality of the skies. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



_019 845 561 1 I 



